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.