Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf recently recognized the Office of Administration and Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) employees for their work on a mobile app that will increase department productivity by an estimated $7.5 million a year.
The Governor’s Awards for Excellence honors exemplary service or job performance that shows increased efficiency, innovation initiative, and leadership.
The app modernizes and streamlines the payroll processing system for PennDOT highway maintenance workers, a system that is now electronic. Previously, foremen hand-wrote timesheets for each employee.
Timesheets were entered into the computer system manually. This method had an 84 percent error rate, and some office staff was spending up to 75 percent of their shift on payroll issues.
Moving to an electronic system will take the error rate down to 25 percent and will allow office staff to focus on other tasks.
“Our employees’ time is valuable, and I’m so pleased that this innovative solution has streamlined operations in the field,” PennDOT Secretary Leslie S. Richards said. “Thanks to the collaboration of PennDOT and Office of Administration employees, a manual process that was once cumbersome is now efficient.”
Development of the app took six months and was completed using a highly collaborative software development approach.