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George Washington Medical Faculty Associates Uses UltiPro to Empower and Engage the Healthcare Community, Elevate HR's Strategic Role
[May 30, 2017]

George Washington Medical Faculty Associates Uses UltiPro to Empower and Engage the Healthcare Community, Elevate HR's Strategic Role


Ultimate Software (Nasdaq: ULTI), a leading provider of human capital management (HCM) solutions in the cloud, announced today that George Washington Medical Faculty Associates, the largest independent physician practice in the Washington, D.C., metro region, is using UltiPro to boost communications and engagement across the Medical Faculty Associates, Inc. ("MFA (News - Alert)") community, to energize its medical providers and staff, and to position HR to drive business results.

MFA has more than 2,000 employees. The group's 750 independent physicians practice 52 medical and surgical specialties, and, as faculty for the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, serve as teachers, mentors, and researchers. MFA maintains a close alliance with The George Washington University and George Washington University Hospital.

Prior to UltiPro, MFA's HR solution limited employee data storage. The restrictions on historical data and the quality of data created significant payroll challenges and produced incomplete reporting. In addition, the system lacked the HCM functionality that MFA desired, such as comprehensive reporting, manager dashboards, and sophisticated performance management tools. MFA sought a robust platform that would assist the Talent Acquisition team in establishing an employer brand to attract, acquire, and retain quality talent, provide the C-Suite with dynamic workforce analytics to gain insight into their clinical and non-clinical workforce, provide managers and employees with a user friendly interface for performance feedback, and act as the single resource for employee information across the enterprise. MFA went live with UltiPro in January 2012.

"Historically, departments would maintain their own employee data either on paper or in an EXCEL worksheet," said Debbie Harrison, director of HR systems at GW Medical Faculty Associates. "Leaders were frustrated that they had to go to multiple sources within the organization to get the 'most updated' employee list which was often inaccurate or incomplete. We needed a platform that was one voice, one system, and one team, and UltiPro has become the single source of truth for employee data."

Harrison reports that MFA has steadily increased UltiPro's touchpoints with employees in an effort to raise awareness of UltiPro and integrate the solution into employees' routines. First, the HR team collaborated with marketing to rebrand UltiPro with a name distinctive to MFA, in order to make the platform feel familiar to the company's employees. Reciprocal links were created between the Intranet and UltiPro, so that employees always have seamless, 360-degree access to MFA-related information. Second, ltiPro's capabilities were expanded to include employee notifications for business continuity, with UltiPro news mirroring information on the Intranet related to patient information and weather closings. In addition, HR deployed a new performance management process that enables managers to complete reviews within UltiPro.



"Our performance management process in the past was a customized Word document for each individual employee - the evaluation was a hard copy form that managers would manually mark up and review. The process was labor intensive and prone to human error," said Harrison. "We generated boxes of papers with no tracking, no insight into our population, and no ratings structure. With UltiPro, we were able to configure the performance management tool so that managers could establish goals, competencies, and find coaching resources on the main smartboard homepage. We have facilitated communication between employees and managers about performance, and as a result, employees are more engaged in their career development. By the end of our first performance management cycle, we had a 92 percent completion rate, a phenomenal response for a company that had very few, if any, automated processes and was set on using paper forms for almost every employee transaction."

Employees' positive response to the sweeping UltiPro initiatives gave HR confidence that UltiPro was the right solution to continue transforming the organization. HR's effectiveness is being felt throughout MFA as additional UltiPro capabilities are activated.


"When I joined the MFA in December of 2014, it was immediately apparent that to achieve the strategic goals of the organization, HR needed to empower the executives, managers, and employees of the MFA with real-time data to improve the quality of its decision making," said Rodney Whitmore, Chief Human Resources Officer at the MFA. "I was pleased to see that we could easily integrate UltiPro into the work environment in ways that directly support our human capital planning initiatives."

"UltiPro has the power to remake a company's culture and change the way they do business," said Greg Swick, chief enterprise sales officer for Ultimate. "We are pleased that UltiPro is the foundation of MFA's efforts to improve processes and structure to be a leader in the DC healthcare market. The solution's flexibility, configurability, and wide-ranging functionality will continue to grow HR's strategic role, and deliver a better experience for employees."

About Ultimate Software

Ultimate is a leading provider of cloud-based human capital management solutions, with more than 33 million people records in the cloud. Ultimate's award-winning UltiPro delivers HR, payroll, talent, and time and labor management solutions that connect people with the information they need to work more effectively. Founded in 1990, Ultimate is headquartered in Weston, Florida, and employs more than 3,800 professionals. In 2017, Fortune ranked Ultimate #7 on its prestigious 100 Best Companies to Work For list, its sixth consecutive year ranked in the top 25, and #1 on Fortune's list of the 10 Best Workplaces in Technology for the second year in a row. Also in 2017, People magazine ranked Ultimate #2 on its 50 Companies That Care list, Brandon Hall Group honored Ultimate with its Gold Award in Technology, and the National Customer Service Association named Ultimate the Service Organization of the Year. Ultimate has more than 3,700 customers with employees in 160 countries, including Bloomin' Brands, Culligan International, Feeding America, Major League Baseball, Red Roof Inn, SUBWAY, Texas Roadhouse, and Yamaha (News - Alert) Corporation of America. More information on Ultimate's products and services for people management can be found at www.ultimatesoftware.com.

UltiPro is a registered trademark of The Ultimate Software Group, Inc. All other trademarks referenced are the property of their respective owners.

Follow Ultimate Software on Twitter (News - Alert): www.twitter.com/UltimateHCM and on LinkedIn (News - Alert): http://linkd.in/UltimateHCM


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