Digitas LLC, a Boston-based direct marketing firm, used software from Salary.com to calculate annual employee pay raises this year, and Holly Thomas, who leads the compensation department, says she'll never go back to spreadsheets. "It's night and day," Thomas says. "What used to be a very labor intensive, worrisome process–because that's just the nature of spreadsheets–has become very state-of-the-art, very efficient."

The marketing company adopted software called CompPlanner, Salary.com's enterprise compensation management (ECM) software, in November 2003 as part of an initiative aimed at freeing up employees so they could focus on building the business. Within months, the new software–which itself only debuted in November–shaved "a couple of hundred hours" off Digitas' merit raise process for this year, Thomas says.

Digitas isn't alone. Companies are turning increasingly to ECM software offered by vendors like Needham, Mass.-based Salary.com and such more established rivals as Kadiri Inc. and Workscape Inc., says Craig Symons, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass. research and consulting firm focused on technology companies. "The technology has become more available and easier to implement," Symons says, and "there's certainly been a move toward adoption of these kinds of packages in the last 12 to 18 months."