Trimble: Centralising absence in a global organisation

Since Trimble initially implemented edays in the UK, Trimble has gone on to introduce the platform into their Netherlands, Romania, and Germany branches to further centralize their absence processes.

Trimble is a software and services technology company that has multiple locations across the globe. Before edays, each location/branch of Trimble managed absence through a variety of different means. For example, their Netherlands branch managed absence via paper and spreadsheets, which was very manual, time-consuming, and not 100% accurate due to human error and employees not always logging holiday correctly.

In Germany, they used an alternative system to manage absence but found that this method lacked clear holiday approval flows, making it harder to see who approved what holiday. This also came with limited visibility over who had a holiday booked and for when, making it difficult for them to plan resources.

These issues led to a real need for Trimble to centralize their absence management processes within one platform and increase the visibility of absence across their organization whilst catering to each country’s local rules and regulations.

Trimble decided to tackle these challenges head-on and went to the market for a new absence management solution to replace the amalgamation of systems that had become a thorn in their side. Their UK branch decided to take the first step and began research to find a system that could meet their needs, the edays Absence Intelligence platform emerged as the front-runner solution to meet their requirements.

Trimble felt that edays’ simplicity, ease of use, and automation functionality set it apart from other platforms on the market. edays and Trimble then began working together and identified three project drivers:

The first was to implement a system that could start to centralize the absence systems they were previously using, catering to the unique absence rules of each region.

The second was to introduce a system that could clearly outline holiday approval flows within the platform. Clearly outlining who was responsible for each employee’s holiday and automatically sending them a notification to review holiday requests when submitted.

The third and final project driver was to utilize a system that could automatically perform entitlement calculations on holiday, sick pay, accruals and feed this information to payroll.

The edays Absence Intelligence platform was first adopted by Trimble’s UK branch and was largely well-received due to its user-friendliness and ability to make managing absence easy! Users could now submit holiday requests within seconds and managers could approve or reject them at the click of a button. It also became a big time saver for Trimble’s HR and finance teams, performing complex entitlement, accrual, and sick pay calculations automatically so they no longer have to worry about them.

This did not go unnoticed by Trimble’s other branches, with the Netherlands branch eager to replace their paper and spreadsheet-based system they reached out to adopt edays. Romania soon followed and more recently Germany transitioned across to edays.

Trimble is now able to cater to each country’s individual absence rules, ensuring local regulations are being followed. On top of this, they now have increased visibility of absence across their organization, through introducing much-needed holiday approval flows and a Google calendar integration. This gives Trimble a clear view of who is in and out of the office and allows them to better plan their holidays around each other and avoid understaffing.

In the future, Trimble plans to further embed edays within their HR ecosystem by integrating it with their HRIS, Workday, to establish a connection between the two platforms.