A 2,500-Employee Berkshire Hathaway Rental Company Unifies and Streamlines HR Processes with Ultimate Software's UltiPro

Ultimate Software (Nasdaq:ULTI), a leading provider of end-to-end strategic human resources, payroll, and talent management solutions, announced today that its customer CORT Business Services, a Berkshire Hathaway Company and leading provider of business and residential rental furniture, apartment locating and relocation services, has achieved significant efficiencies with UltiPro.

Delivered through Intersourcing, Ultimate Software’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, UltiPro has enabled the 2,500-employee, nationwide company to abandon its previous multi-application approach of using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor for HR, a service bureau for outsourcing payroll, and an in-house manual process for time and attendance.

Now, with UltiPro, CORT has one comprehensive system to handle its core HR processes, including payroll, benefits administration, online benefits enrollment, and time and labor management. Acquiring this broad scope of HR feature-sets through Intersourcing has resulted in even greater gains than expected. Since going “live” on UltiPro in July 2006, CORT’s IT team has been able to redirect its time and resources to key business projects because Ultimate Software has the responsibility for hardware, system software, and ongoing system maintenance.

“To accommodate our industry’s specific needs, we developed some of our own software for activities critical to running our business, like inventory management. When we were considering potential HR solution providers, we wanted to ensure that our IT team would not have to support our new human resource management system (HRMS) and could focus on our core business applications,” said Debbie Lansford, CFO for CORT.

“With my financial background and understanding of the rental industry, I see the value in leasing software. Selecting UltiPro as SaaS, we did not have to make a large capital investment in a software license. It really makes good business sense to let Ultimate Software handle the upgrades, maintenance, and the hardware.”

Another decision-driver in selecting UltiPro was time management tools. Prior to purchasing UltiPro Time and Attendance, employee hours were collected manually by managers and forwarded to their supervisors. After obtaining necessary approvals, the hours and rates were entered onto spreadsheets and funneled to a half-dozen offices, where they were compiled for payroll. Because information was passed from person to person, the process was time consuming, confusing, and prone to error.

“The most important benefit of UltiPro Time and Attendance is how it has made processes easier on our field managers, who spend much less effort managing employee time records compared with before. They can log in and see their team’s year-at-a-glance attendance, or a manager can drill down to study a specific individual’s data. Since sick and vacation time are submitted conveniently online, managers give approvals in seconds and can cross-reference requests against paid-time-off balances,” said Eileen Buckley, payroll manager for CORT. “We used to have 12 people working on the payroll process, but with core UltiPro for human resource management and payroll processing and UltiPro Time and Attendance, as well as a restructuring of our internal processes, we have been able to cut that number in half because everything is automated, centralized, and better reporting is available.”

Another detail-intensive challenge many companies must tackle is streamlining benefits open enrollment. Before using UltiPro, CORT’s HR team members traveled to each location during benefits enrollment, distributed information, answered employee questions, collected the hand-written forms, and brought them back to the main office. Field staff would then fly in to the Fairfax, VA, headquarters to help input benefits changes and complete the cumbersome project.

“With UltiPro, benefits enrollment is easy for our employees and efficient,” said Buckley. “Employees log in and can update their benefits choices, if needed, on their own, and because they are responsible for entering their personal selections through self-service, there are fewer opportunities for error. There is no need for anyone to travel anywhere or try to interpret hand-written forms. UltiPro has made open enrollment so much better that it’s like day and night in comparison to our old approach.”

“CORT has done an excellent job transforming labor management with UltiPro,” said Greg Swick, chief sales officer for Ultimate Software. “UltiPro’s complete suite of features can help executives handle the entire gamut of employee-centric processes with a single software-as-a-service provider.”

About CORT

CORT is a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. company (NYSE:BRK.A and BRK.B). For more than 35 years, CORT has been a leading provider in rental furniture, accessories and related services in the "rent-to-rent" furniture industry for companies and individuals. CORT customers include more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. CORT's www.ApartmentSearch.com is the nation's most comprehensive online apartment search service, and CORT is the nation's leading provider of rental furniture to trade shows and events. CORT has more than 2,500 employees in 34 states with offices in every major metro market. In addition, CORT has an expanding global presence with affiliates in more than 50 countries.

About Ultimate Software

A leading provider of end-to-end strategic human resources, payroll, and talent management solutions, Ultimate Software markets its award-winning UltiPro products as on-demand services through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, Intersourcing, and as licensed software. Based in Weston, FL, the Company employs approximately 800 professionals who are focused on developing the highest quality products and services. In January 2008, Ultimate Software was the first HR/payroll SaaS provider to be audited and awarded the ISO/IEC 27001:2005 Certification for security management. The Company’s internal technology team won a first place award for its management of Intersourcing from the American Business Awards in 2007, and its customer service team won two first-place awards for service excellence in 2006, one from the Service & Support Professionals Association and another from the American Business Awards. Ultimate Software was ranked #3 on the 2006 and 2007 lists of the Best Medium-Sized Companies to Work For in America by the Great Place to Work Institute, and has approximately 1,600 customers representing diverse industries, including such organizations as The Container Store, Elizabeth Arden, Major League Baseball, The New York Yankees Baseball Team, Nintendo of America, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and Sony BMG Entertainment. More information on Ultimate Software’s products and services can be found at www.ultimatesoftware.com.

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