How Criterion is Making HR Simple for Companies Using Procore

Colby Haverkamp:

Really excited to have everyone here in attendance today. This is something we've been working on for a long time. We do have clients actively using this integration, so we have some really good feedback and examples we can talk about today, some case studies being produced, and we're actually going to show the integration live in kind of a demo environment today with the help of my colleague and our principal solutions architect, Steve Tompkins.

So excited to have you all joining us today. We do want to keep this informational, conversational, so if you have questions, please feel free to drop those in the chat or Q&A. We'll pause at the end of the discussion to answer any outstanding questions and we'll try to monitor them throughout as well if there's anything that we can answer in the moment. But other than that, happy Wednesday and thank you for joining us.

So we are Criterion obviously. Hopefully everyone here knows that today and we are a human capital management software provider. Main things worth acknowledging is that this is a natively built solution by us, no acquisitions, completely built by our team, and solely supported by our team. So this is the only solution that we support and we take great pride in delivering a quality experience from the beginning of your conversations with us all the way to becoming a client and through the long term. We do everything directly, which includes implementations, support, development, and I'll talk some about some of the specifics of that moving forward.

This is a fully unified solution. We're going to talk about a few components of it today that are specifically needed around the Procore use case, but just know that we do have the key components of talent engagement, which includes things like your applicant cracking, performance management, total candidate experience as well, a full HRIS solution that includes everything you would expect to see there and then a payroll solution that lines up well with Procore.

At this time, we do have over 500 customers. That's actually probably nearing more around the 750 mark and we also take a lot of pride in having a good customer success rating. This is a really important metric for us and I think it's worth noting that customers stay with us long term and I think that's not only due to the way that we interact externally, but that we do have a great workplace culture. So I like to reference that as well.

For any good HCM, it's critically important that we have technology partners and solutions because although we provide a integral part to every organization, there are components that simply we need assistance with or we have to play with existing solutions that are already present. I'm not going to read everything here on this slide for you today. We're happy to provide these slides after the fact through the recording, but I did want to acknowledge a few things that I think are pretty important for anyone observing this, either from the Procore team or as a Procore client or Criterion client.

Noting that we have a number of technology alliances; these are not all of them, but just some of the key ones that we frequently interact with. And then many of those include ERP and accounting solutions, which reside at the core of really any organization. And so frequently these groups seek out Criterion because we are 100% open API and we can easily integrate with virtually any solution on the market that has the capabilities too.

So noting that this is an important piece, we also have a number of solution partners who help us with various things like background checks, more specific processes that integrate nicely with our solution and feed into the overall employee experience. And then we are hosted on AWS, but we work with a pretty much every security provider out there, whether that's for single sign-on capabilities or just general alignment for our clients. And we do have a presence across over 10 countries. You can see those listed here with full payroll capabilities in the US, Canada, and UK.

So let's talk about the piece that everybody is probably actually most interested in, which is our integration with Procore and why you're here today. This is something that we looked at for a long time, being a group that resided as one of our key industries in construction, architecture and engineering. So from our perspective, this felt just like a really easy fit.

It's actually probably something we were a bit surprised that we didn't jump on sooner. But it's been an excellent relationship with Procore and all the clients that are previously just Procore clients that have now selected Criterion. We've had really enjoyable experiences and the implementation around this and the utilization of the integration has been great. Getting into the specifics, this is what we would call probably version one.

For this, I believe that there will be additional information going back and forth. We're exploring things like scheduling workforce management in the future as well as potentially expenses and things of that nature. But out of the gate, this was the piece that we had communicated to us by our clients as well as the Procore clients after speaking with them at Groundbreak and some other events. And these are the pieces that were critically most important.

As we see this data flow chart here, we can see that project data is frequently coming from Procore into Criterion. The employee data housed in Criterion would go to Procore. And then we have a bidirectional movement here for time sheets. You can use one or all of these if you'd like to. We will show this during the demo portion today, but we've seen some really unique use cases already arise and specifically some of that being around the time sheet bidirectional sync.

So specifically, our motto at Criterion is we want to make the processes as easy for any organization that we align with, and we don't want to upend practices that are already well established or working well. So when it comes to anything, we try to remain agnostic and just pick the path of least resistance for you and for your employees. So when it comes to things like time sheets, if you're tracking them in Procore and everybody's doing a really proficient job there, we'd encourage you to do that.

Some organizations have approached us and said, we're never going to track time in Criterion and then found maybe it's more beneficial to have their office staff track time in Criterion while their field workers continue to track, or there's a combination of the two. We can import and incorporate time from virtually anywhere as long as we have the appropriate data. And this has been a really seamless experience. So especially for many HR, payroll and finance teams, this has been a component of really consolidating the experience so that especially that payroll piece moves forward very efficiently.

Employee data, everything that you would expect to see in an HCF solution, but all of the appropriate HR information, whether that's associations with job sites, certification information as you see here, availability even, and then labor costs at a very, very high granularity, and this attributes itself to project data as well. So all these mixing together out of the box, we track eight levels of complexity when it comes to labor costing. So this could be project, sub-project, task, sub-task, whatever your naming convention may be, we can accommodate that and especially operating in this space for quite a while, this has been a huge differentiator for us and helped a lot of our clients with those complexities.

When it comes to talking about HCM specifically and what you'll see in the market, for those of you that aren't familiar, this is a extremely saturated landscape and I'll speak a little bit about where groups reside. But overall here, what we've seen from our research is a failure to strike balance between power and usability. And what we mean by that is that often there are organizations who are really well-equipped for let's say groups that have under 50 employees down here on the left end of the spectrum.

They are great user experiences, but they really are limited on the functionality or the ability to handle any complex processes. As we get into the middle here, there were huge enterprise vendors who provide really robust platforms, but it's tough to configure. It can be a huge time constraint as well as pretty costly to make those changes. So what we're trying to do is really arrive here in the middle, providing enterprise-grade solution that can be truly configurable, not customized for more money or hours of work by your team, but a configurable experience that can grow with your organization over time.

And then we do have to note because sometimes we do get compared to these service bureaus, these are really quite a bit different than HCM solutions overall and the fact that they really take control of the payroll process and they often lack integration with various systems. So we view them entirely as a group not really associated with us or even comparable, but the are groups that come up in conversations sometimes.

Excuse me, talking about Criterion specifically. I've mentioned a few of these things out of the gate, but just to reiterate, we do have three key solutions. I'm happy to share information with anyone that reaches out to us or would like to request additional information about the specifics of these modules. You can purchase one or all three of them, really just needing the payroll piece if you're looking to utilize the Procore integration.

But each of these contain an all-inclusive approach so you get all the functionality associated with each of these modules. We don't ala carte or piecemeal and come back and make you buy specific portions. It's a truly all-inclusive approach, including any enhancements that we make. We do focus highly on user experience. So that's not only a clean self-service but a solution that's overall easy to use whether you're interacting from a desktop or a mobile device.

And this includes time clocks too. So you may have the capability to punch in time from a clock and then clock out on your phone or clock back in on a browser. The entire solution is able to speak to the other portions no matter where you reside. And as long as you have those permissions, you've got the ability to really scale how you do things and have a cohesive solution that seamlessly operates throughout.

As mentioned, we do have a really robust integration environment. We're frequently building new integrations constantly with that open API documentation on hand and then some attractive pricing options that I'm happy to highlight as well, which includes price locks on per employee per month premiums, as well as some attractive things around things like opportunities for growth for organizations. This is definitely not a comprehensive representation of how we help the construction industry, but this is something that I typically see as some of the high level items. I've already alluded to a few of them, but when we're looking at meeting the demands of construction, we know that the ability to be flexible, the ability to make changes quickly and on the fly, especially from an admin perspective, is really important.

So if we look at something from the perspective of finance and payroll, I spoke a little bit about labor costing already, but having the capabilities to do things like easily run union payrolls or multiple states or multiple companies, even across multiple countries in a lot of instances can be easily done all from one environment and one single sign-on. You don't have to navigate between different logins for different companies. You can run reports for everything all in one place.

And as mentioned, obviously the connectivity with Procore and the ERP is a big reason why we're here today, so you'll continue to hear me talk about the emphasis on this. I'll talk about it at the very end with our case study that's coming out. But we view this as either a circular movement or a linear movement of data as Criterion being a critical portion of completing that process and really making it easy for folks to grab the information that they need and provide it to their employees, administration and so forth.

And then from the human resources perspective, having a solution like this really does make life easier for everyone. So we're looking at some of the things that are tough to quantify sometimes, but boosted employee engagement, things that are easier to quantify, stuff like reduced turnover, overall reduce and risk, and the ability to track costs across the board for folks on various metrics that are important.

Internally at Criterion, we are constantly trying to improve upon our solutions, though as I said, we're very proud of it and this is a huge component of us being successful. So we do provide quarterly releases and all of the enhancements are provided to our clients at no additional cost. We push about 20 to 30 major enhancements a quarter, and most of these are driven by a mechanism called Voice of the Customer where people will submit ideas, our clients will vote upon them, have discussions, and there's a place where people can just look at other ideas and say, "Hey, this would work well for me too." And often, 75% of the things that we're pushing as an enhancement per quarter come directly from our clients. So very proud of that and I think it allows us to continue to be a future-proof application for all organizations. And then a huge component paired with that is really how we support our clients and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere in this space with a better success and support team.

So what we do provide is a named client success manager. This is an actual person that you can reach out to, you can call, email, communicate with them as much as you'd like, but this is somebody that knows your account. And for us, between our client success managers and our implementation team, they average over five years in 10 years. So they're familiar with complex projects, they're familiar with Criterion and they become familiar with your account. I don't know about anybody out there in the audience, but it's really infuriating for me to be utilizing a solution and have to rotate through a new client success manager every few months and reteach them on what my organization is and what we do. I think that continuity is huge, especially when talking about a solution like this.

Touched on a couple of the other portions already regarding that feature request portal and our quarterly software updates. We do provide continuous complimentary administrator training, so this includes if you need a refresher as an admin or you have a new administrator begin, we'll train them at no additional charge so that everybody's familiar with the solution and feeling comfortable moving forward. We do also have live monitoring of our current historical software and 100% uptime, which includes when we push these enhancements. And then last piece, probably everybody's favorite portion implementation. As I mentioned before, and I'll say it again, we do this directly so you will not be pushed to a third party to complete a Criterion implementation. And we are very custom fit on this. We probably focus on it more than most organizations, but we believe it's critically important for the success of anybody using a solution like this or at least using it proficiently.

So we have a lot of in-person meetings, we do hands-on training with actual proof of concepts so that folks feel comfortable utilizing the solution, utilizing the integrations that are in place that we're speaking about today, and really making sure that everybody feels equipped to roll this out to their entire employee base. And here are just a few examples of some of the folks in our construction sector that we have. There are definitely some Procore users that are going through implementation right now, not listed on this page, but they will be here shortly and we'll talk about one of those here in a second.

And then just finally, this is a solution that's built on experience and really designed for success. So I would encourage anybody that has questions for us, feedback, asks of unique challenges, anything that they're trying to tackle that they're struggling with, maybe from an HCM perspective or just integration capabilities writ large with ERPs and project management groups like Procore, come and have a conversation with us. We always are welcoming these ideas and we feel like we're a pretty unique vendor in this space and happy to entertain ideas across the board. So at this time, I will pause and quit talking and allow you all to see probably the portion you're most interested in. My colleague Steve Tompkins will demo the integration between Procore and Criterion.

Steve Tompkins:

Thank you Colby. Share my screen here. Okay, hopefully you're able to see my screen here. What I'm going to be doing is bouncing back and forth between the two products here just to show you how the integration works and you can see what's going on here. So I'm going to start here in Procore just to show you an example of how the employee data is going to sync. Now, this is coming normally from Criterion into Procore. You add a new employee, you edit an existing employee or you terminate an employee. That information is going to get pushed over in real time into the record over here, and I'll show you how that works here. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and just update one of my employees in my company here. You see Ted, he's a manager. Here's his information in the system so you can see what's going on with him.

I'll just hit view. If you're familiar with Procore, you've probably seen this screen before on employees, but you can see the information right there. The address is a field actually that we do not need to send. I have that enabled in mine just so you can see how that works there. But you'll see the other fields that are on here. Let me jump over, excuse me, into Criterion. And this is the same employee, Ted. I can see his information here, and you'll see of course how it's matching up to that information there. Now of course, we don't bring every single field over right now, but if there is ever a need to bring over something you see here and you want it to show up over in Procore, we can certainly look at adding that capability. Of course the field has to exist in Procore, but you'll see that. So here's an example. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to change his mobile phone number and the sync will run automatically and I'll just refresh on the other screen. You'll see it over there. So let's just do that.

All right, change his number there. Maybe he doesn't like that one. Let me just do this here. Let's see if it lets me do that. Nope, you know what? Let me put a one in front of it and that should allow me to do that. Okay, I'm just going to copy and paste because this was working for me a moment ago. Here we go. So you'll see the mobile phone number change. I'll hit saved. Now, any of these other fields I changed also, if I change something, I'll see as an employment, his position that would also get updated. Let's just show you this when I refresh, you'll notice that the mobile phone number changed there. The other things would've changed as well if I changed listed address or other information there. So that's how that works there.

Now you will see also things like project. So he's connected to these two projects in the system. What that does is going back the other direction, is it links them to the projects over here so you don't have to assign them in both places. You assign them in Procore and they get assigned over here. So that works automatically whether you do that here on the employee record or if you're over in the project record over in Procore, you could do that over here. For an example, if I go to this Criterion project, I can add people to this to get them in there. So I might go in here and excuse me, I'm not a Procore expert, so when I get in here I need to look around, but as I add people in here, it will add it over there.

Same thing if I were to add a project over here, if I come in and add a new project over here, it will add it on the other side. So I might come over here and say, this is the Sierra West project and I'll put a price on it here very quickly. Let me just say it started last month and it's going to be completed the end of September. Here you'll see the other information. Let me just go ahead and create this.

Now when I do this, of course there's other permissions and things you need to set up in the system. So I'm just going to very quickly do this because what you're going to see is that it's going to show up on the other side. So I can go in here and for an example, go into the directory and I can add employees in here. Maybe I want to add in Ted as an example. So I might search for Ted and add him in here as a user of this one here or any of the other people, I can add them in there. But what's going to happen is when I go over to the other side, the other side being Criterion, is I'm now going to see that new project over there. So here's the project as they were before I added it and when I hit refresh there, there's the new project right here, so it works bidirectionally there.

Now of course there might be fields over here that don't exist over in Procore and that's okay. We might need to update something over here. Let's say you're doing time tracking in our system. You might need to put the overtime rule as an example, or you're doing a certified rate. So there are certain settings over here that we might need to add, but that shows you how that works there. The project thinking and like I mentioned, the employees would get assigned to the projects as I add them into the project there.

Finally is the time tracking and how we can send it. Now I'm going to show you from our system into Procore, but we can go bidirectionally. As Colby mentioned, you might have some people who do time entry in Procore and you want that to come over to our system for payroll processing. Vice versa, you might have time entry that that happens in our system. You want to push that over to Procore so it hits the project. We don't care which way you go there.

So here if you're familiar with our system, this is what a team time sheet looks like. I'm in as an approver. I'll go to an A person's time sheet just so you could see how this works. This person is assigned to two projects, a Criterion Project and a Procore project. So he's put some time in here, a very simple time entry. Of course we can be very much more detailed in here, but I made it simple for this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and approve this right here and go ahead and approve that and you'll see this other one here for Chris. I might want to look at his and approve that there, but I could do that right there.

Now I also have the option if you're not a familiar Criterion user to mass approve and see that over there. But what that's going to do is now I'm going to go back to my time sheets here. Let's just look at the date range, 4/2 to 4/8. So if I go back to that timeframe, let's say 4/5, I believe I should have some time there. Here you can see Chris and Fred, there's their time that was on the other sheet. You may remember he had eight hours on that day. As I go back to the other one, if I go to Chris, he had two hours on that day and you can see how that's synchronized right there. There's the two hours. He also had eight hours here at the Criterion project. So if I switched over to the Criterion project and I looked at the time sheets for that, I'd be able to see that over there.

So the time is being pushed over. As soon as it's approved, gets pushed over so I don't have to sync or export import situation. Now we push it directly straight across and then the other way around, what we would do is we would pull in any time sheets. Once they're approved in Procore, we'd pull them into our time sheets so that you could then go ahead and use that for payroll. So just a very high level overview of how that works there. We're certainly happy to answer any questions you might put in the chat with the Q&A, but I'm going to go ahead and pass the baton back over to Colby so we can wrap this up. So thank you very much.

Colby Haverkamp:

Thank you Steve. That's very helpful. We are listed, obviously, on Procore's marketplace, so we have additional information there if you need anything. We have a great white paper detailing that data movement that's available there. I can also share that directly with anyone that would like that information. And we also have a pretty comprehensive feature document if you're looking to just explore our modules, we're more than happy to share any of those things. Outside of that, we are really, really excited to announce that we'll be releasing a case study soon with Bayley Construction. This is a longer term client of Criterion that was using Procore separately before we built the integration and so seemed like a very natural fit overall and we've received really good feedback around the utilization of this.

So we're excited to talk about it. This will be our US example. We've got some Canadian clients that are now live and a few in integration that are also using the integration. So we'll probably look at having a case study for Canada as well. But as we continue to have more and more come online, the emphasis for us is really, as I alluded to before, the ability for data to flow freely between ERP project management and HCM. We think that Procore is the perfect partner for us in that space and we're able to work with virtually any ERP solution on the market that will allow us to. We have a lot of familiarity with building those integrations and in this case, when it comes to Bayley, it will be Acumatica.

But if you have others that you have questions about whether we have an existing integration or you'd like to learn more about how we might partner with someone that we haven't previously, more than happy to explore that with everyone. So with that being said, that concludes the main points that we were going to talk about today. I know we had more time allotted, but we'll open this up now for Q&A if there are any. And if there is not, we are happy to give time back to folks at this time.

Okay, well currently not seeing any. Steve gets to consistently hear the same jokes from me, so I did my eight count there as a former teacher. Seeing no questions we can wrap up for today. As mentioned, posted on the Procore marketplace is our information, including our white paper about this integration. We have great documentation around the features of Criterion as well and be looking for that case study for sure because we'll be posting that all over the place in the near future also. So thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate your participation and we look forward to hopefully speaking with more of you soon. Thanks so much. Have a great rest of your week.