Workbrain Automates Employee Management

Its software tracks time and attendance and automates human resources activity

By Amy Helen Johnson

August 6, 2001 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - British Airways PLC, a London-based airline, flies high-tech airplanes that carry passengers across the Atlantic in less than seven hours. Calculating wages for its 3,000 North American employees takes considerably longer because of an inefficient system that processes time cards by hand, says Steve Pruneau, a project manager at British Airways' U.S. headquarters in Jackson Heights, New York.
Pruneau hopes to change that with the help of Workbrain Inc., a Burlington, Mass.-based vendor of employee management applications. After a three-month pilot project involving one airport and one call center location, British Airways is ready to roll out Workbrain Employee Relationship Management (ERM) Solutions to its employees.
Forms Add Function
Pruneau says Workbrain got the job at British Airways because its rules engine is flexible enough to handle the arcane wage-calculation algorithms based on Federal Aviation Administration regulations and labor union contracts.

WORKBRAIN CEO David Ossip says his company’s forte is handling a company’s “high-volume, high-value” transactions.

Workbrain Inc.
Location: 880 Winter St., Suite 130
Waltham, Mass. 02451

Telephone: (781) 890-3208

Web: www.workbrain.com

The technology: Web-based self-service human resources applications, including time-and-attendance modules. The software, built using Enterprise Java Beans and XML, also supports wireless connections.

Company officers:
• David Ossip, founder and CEO
• Scott Morrell, vice president of technology
• David Stein, vice president of sales

Milestones:
• Dec. 1999: Company founded
• April 2000: First product released
• May 2001: Raised $20 million in second- round funding
• June 2001: Version 2.5 released

Employees: 105

Products/pricing: Workbrain ERM Solutions; $50 to $200 per seat

Burn Money: $25 million from NB Capital Venture Partners, ABS Ventures, Accenture Technology Ventures and private investors

Customers: British Airways, Russell Corp., Tennessee Valley Authority

Red flags for IT:
•The product requires a significant effort to set up rules and forms.
• Established human resources software vendors are working on adding similar tools.

David Ossip, founder and CEO of Workbrain, says that flexibility comes from the product's technical foundation as a messaging application. Everything in Workbrain ERM is a form with workflow and business rules attached, he says. This approach means that the rules are separate from the form objects, so changing, updating or deleting rules doesn't affect the rest of the customer's application. Workbrain also integrates with back-end payroll and human resources systems.
Another key technology in Workbrain is its Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based Web implementation, says Paul Hamerman, research director at consultancy Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. This feature gives it the advantages of rapid deployment and the ability to work with many devices, such as PCs, kiosks, handheld computers and wireless phones.
The Workbrain ERM system contains several modules, including time and attendance, statistical analysis, self-service human

Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Additional Resources

POLL RESULTS

Leading IT Pros Weigh In on Top IT Issues

Accelerate your knowledge of the IT world you inhabit by viewing the results of a series of polls taken by your IT peers. These polls of 100+ IT professionals each are available for full viewing. They cover key topics such as virtualization, processor performance, green IT, cloud computing and many others. Be a part of the buzz.

WHITE PAPER

For Best Results, Think Beyond the Box

Technology is complex. Keeping it running productively shouldn't be. To that end, you want to minimize the number of solutions needed in-house to simplify operations, maintenance, and support. Kodak offers a best-practices model. One company provides support for both scanner and software, for fast problem resolution without vendor finger-pointing. Download now!

WHITE PAPER

Accelerating the Path to Demand Intelligence with a Demand Signal Repository

Utilizing demand intelligence improves the precision of pricing, product assortments, channel/store placement, and promotion, which are all essential for sustainable revenue management performance. Learn more, download this free whitepaper today.

White Papers & Webcasts

An SMB's Guide to ECM Software
Learn how to choose an ECM solution that helps increase productivity, provide better customer service, and automate time-consuming, paper-based processes....

Managing And Protecting Your Ever Increasing Mobile Assets
Learn best practices for desktop and application virtualization, computer security, and computer life-cycle management....

File Integrity Monitoring: Secure Your Virtual and Physical IT Environments
Learn how integrity monitoring software solutions enable IT organizations to achieve and maintain configuration control. Tripwire® Enterprise is the first solution to effectively...

IDC Webcast: Linux Adoption in a Global Recession
Join Al Gillen from IDC and Michael Applebaum from Novell in this on-demand webcast to see how Linux has emerged as an even...

Enterprise Application Delivery: No User Left Behind
Enterprises need the ability to deliver applications, with the appropriate levels of performance and security to all users, using any device, across any...

Novell Opens PR Video
Is the Linux desktop for me? Customers are looking for ways to be more flexible and save money. Using Linux offers a great...

The CIO's New Guide to Design of Global IT Infrastructure
Is it possible to eliminate the impact of distance? This paper explores the 5 key principles successful CIOs are using to redesign IT...

2 Minutes to IT workload automation
Take just 2 minutes to watch this short CONTROL-M flash video. Well show you how BMC CONTROL-M can put money back into your...

Business Value of Performance IDC Whitepaper
Are you looking for a comprehensive solution that addresses insufficient or congested bandwidth, impaired application performance, slow remote backup and replication or obstacles...

Security Configuration Management
In this web video, follow along with Jim Hansen, Senior Product Manager with Big Fix, as he explains why Security Configuration Management is...

All White Papers | All Webcasts