During 2007, following a period of rapid growth, the organisation recognised a need to update the way in which it managed the time and attendance for weekly and monthly paid employees. Joanne Mortimore, Kronos Implementation Manager, Great Bear Distribution explains: “We had an entirely manual system for time recording, with depot managers responsible for emailing over weekly timesheets which were then checked against employee contracts before being keyed into payroll for the weekly processing deadline. The system was time consuming, open to error and, as the company expanded, it became increasingly difficult to meet the weekly payroll deadline.”
This requirement to alleviate the pressure on payroll and the desire to have one central database for all working hours, holidays and sickness was the key driver for the project to replace the manual timekeeping system with Kronos – a fully automated time and attendance solution which would interface with payroll and provide real-time visibility to employee working time and which would offer the required amount of scalability to cope with growing employee numbers.
“We selected Kronos following a thorough evaluation of a number of vendors,” explains Joanne Mortimore. “As a global organisation, Kronos provides a first rate support network, invests in its research and development programme and its customers benefit from the experience it gains from having a large, international network of customers.”
Following a pilot, where the organisation ran Kronos in parallel with its existing system, Great Bear Distribution has, to date, installed Kronos at almost all of its sites, which account for over 80% of the workforce. All employees are required to record their working hours using biometric finger scanners and depot managers have the responsibility of approving the electronic time card in Kronos and submitting this to payroll
on Monday morning each week. The payroll team makes a final check before running the interface into payroll.
Using Kronos across these sites has already delivered tangible benefits to Great Bear Distribution.
Eliminating payroll pressure
A key driver for the project was to remove the weekly pressure on the payroll department to collect in timesheets from all depots, validate them and manually key them into payroll before the Monday deadline. It was becoming increasingly difficult to manage this process particularly when there was the added pressure of Monday bank holidays to accommodate and a fixed deadline of Thursday for paying employees. “It would generally take us until late on Monday to process the payroll but since using Kronos we’ve been in a position to complete payroll in a more timely manner and expect it to improve further as remaining depots come online. We now instruct all depots to sign off timesheets in Kronos by 10.00am on a Monday morning, ready for running the payroll interface at 11.00am. This increased level of efficiency has enabled us to re-deploy one member of the payroll team, which of course reduces our labour cost in this one area,” explains Joanne Mortimore.
Real-time visibility prompts project to renew business processes
The organisation now benefits from real-time availability of information enabling depot managers to accurately check and forecastlabourcostsfortheirdepot. Managersarealsoableto quickly spot absence and sickness trends, something that was much more difficult to access using the manual timekeeping system.
Adding employees onto the Kronos system highlighted the number of different pay rules and locally interpreted rules across the organisation. It was never the intention of the company to radically overhaul employee contracts as part of the project but, as Joanne Mortimore explains, the information now available in Kronos has been a catalyst for a new project to review business processes. “Initially Kronos has been set up to replicate and automate the timekeeping system we had. However, with 100% visibility now to the number of different pay rules we have for employees and greater insight into the way in which the same set of rules have been interpreted differently by each depot, we’re now looking to simplify terms and conditions across the company.”