NIHAO Cultural Arts Center runs Chinese preschool, aftercare, and language programs in Southern California. Since the center is responsible for teaching and supervising hundreds of students in multiple age groups throughout eight locations, it’s crucial for instructors to have ready access to their shift schedules—and for the operations team to be quick on its feet addressing last-minute changes in case of illnesses or emergencies. 

But NIHAO ran into problems when it managed schedules in spreadsheets. The shift charts took time to manually create and email out to employees. And when administrators approved schedule changes verbally without updating the chart, employees became confused about which shifts they were expected for. What’s more, since time off and sick leave data wasn’t synced with the schedules, the center had trouble finding fill-ins for last-minute coverage. “It was kind of a mess,” said Lucy Kou, NIHAO’s Director of Operations. “We had to look in multiple places to see who’s available.”

On top of the scheduling woes, NIHAO had issues with its payroll and HR services provider, ADP, which Fong Hsu, Vice President of Finance and Operations, said lacked the support and automations that could help the center run smoother. It was high time for an upgrade.

NIHAO got rid of spreadsheet scheduling and ADP in favor of Rippling. Now, the center manages scheduling, time and attendance, payroll, onboarding, recruiting, and training courses from a single, unified platform. 

“What really attracted us to Rippling was the automation,” Fong said. “We found that as we use more and more of the Rippling functionality, it’s cut more and more time spent on administrative things that used to take longer with ADP.”

As we use more and more of the Rippling functionality, it’s cut more and more time spent on administrative things that used to take longer with ADP.

Fong Hsu

Vice President of Finance at NIHAO Cultural Arts Center

Rippling’s scheduling tool allows NIHAO to manage shifts across every site with fewer headaches and better visibility. In preparation for a new school year, Lucy set up five different location schedules in less than 30 minutes. 

Neither employees nor administrators have to look in multiple places to view time off and shifts across locations. “Ever since we switched to Rippling, we’ve been able to have everything aligned, whether it’s time off or when employees are at which location,” Lucy said. “It’s been a lot smoother and easier for employees to open one app to look at their schedule and clock in and out of work.”

According to Fong, Rippling helps the center keep better track of any scheduling updates. “Changes are easier to communicate when they’re made in one place, versus trying to mix and match from various places,” he said. “Rippling gave us a bird’s eye view to help us manage multiple employees in multiple locations.”

Rippling also saved NIHAO time on administrative onboarding work. “We don’t have as many hours dedicated to manual tasks that accompany hiring and maintaining information in the HRIS,” Fong said. 

For instance, it used to take up to two hours for the center to create email addresses for new employees and manually assign them to their needed Google Groups. With Rippling, it only takes a minute or two, since NIHAO configured the system to automatically handle these tasks after a couple clicks. 

Rippling also reduced NIHAO’s need to meet with employees to discuss onboarding to-dos. “With ADP, we had to schedule a one hour call with about 60 percent of the employees to go through everything—the forms you need to complete and whatnot,” Fong said. “Now, I would say we need to do that for about five percent of the employees.” And since NIHAO also uses Rippling’s Learning Management System, the center can set up the course builder to pre-record trainings, so existing team members don’t spend time conducting how-to sessions for every new hire. 

According to Fong, Rippling allows NIHAO to run payroll in less time and with more flexibility. “If an employee leaves or we forget something and just need to make little adjustments, those are a lot easier within Rippling versus ADP,” he said. The system also reduced manual work. Paying employees used to take six hours—sometimes longer if there were any issues due to long hold times with ADP’s customer support. With Rippling, pay runs now only take two hours.

• Time saved: With Rippling automations, NIHAO runs payroll three times faster and saves two hours per hire with onboarding.
• Streamlined scheduling: Admins can create shift schedules across eight locations in less than an hour. Employees can view shifts, clock in, and track time off requests and approvals from one app. 
• All-in-one workforce management: NIHAO unified scheduling, time-tracking, onboarding, payroll learning management, and recruiting into one platform.