Category: Computer & Electronics

Kronos

K-12 schools, colleges, and universities are turning to Kronos® Incorporated to fill time and attendance gaps left by their ERP systems. Kronos automates, centralizes, and integrates critical workforce business processes to help control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce p

CHELMSFORD, Mass., (September 14, 2009) –

K-12 schools, colleges, and universities are turning to Kronos® Incorporated to fill time and attendance gaps left by their ERP systems. Kronos automates, centralizes, and integrates critical workforce business processes to help control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity for educational institutions.
News Facts

* Time and attendance products offered by ERP vendors are unable to meet the budgetary requirements of educational institutions. These solutions take longer and are more expensive to implement and maintain as they often rely on custom code and scripting languages. Also, they don’t offer the tools to gain real-time control over payroll data and overall labor costs including overtime, absenteeism, and scheduling problems.
* Rudimentary time and attendance solutions from ERPs can leak hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars each year as they don’t detect labor-related problems for days.
* Considering that labor costs represent one of the largest expenses for schools and higher education institutions, often exceeding 70 percent of operational budget, time and attendance data collection is a great place to look for quick payback.
* Educational institutions including Broward County Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, Cornell University, and Yale University use Kronos time and attendance solutions to extend the value of their ERP investment.

Supporting Quotes

* Jerome Goudelock, acting chief HR operations officer, Chicago Public Schools
“Managing staff overtime and maximizing operational efficiencies can make the difference between meeting or exceeding budget. But you can’t control what you don’t see. Kronos offers high-quality, real-time data about the workforce leading to cost savings. The best-of-breed Kronos solution easily integrates with our existing ERP system and helps us leverage that investment to control labor costs.”
* Kathy Tessendorf, director of human resource information, Northwestern University
“The Kronos solution enhances communication among departments and divisions through easy integration capabilities and provides real-time reporting from a centralized database. As grant funding has become an increasingly crucial part of education budgets, by using Kronos, we are able to total all hours employees work from all of their jobs for overtime calculations as well as giving us the ability to keep accurate reporting for separate grant projects.”
* Kimberly Curtis, PMP, senior project manager, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Payroll is typically a university’s largest expense, and with a dispersed and complex workforce, they need a system that automates processes and handles multiple and complex pay rules. With Kronos, pay rules are easily configured, tested, and deployed across the entire campus. This helps control labor costs, improve productivity, and achieve greater ROI.”
* Christine Carmichael, director of education industry marketing, Kronos
“At Kronos, we strive to offer detailed workforce intelligence to help our customers take positive action. As a result, they can extend the value of other technology investments such as ERPs to minimize absenteeism rates and control labor costs, ultimately resulting in better service to students, employees, and the community.”

Supporting Resources

* Kronos offers an integration tool, which makes it even easier for organizations to integrate Kronos applications with existing ERP, payroll, and human resources systems (see “Kronos Announces Availability of Workforce Central 6.1”).

About Kronos Incorporated

Kronos is the global leader in workforce management solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000® — use Kronos time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications. To learn how Kronos uniquely delivers complete automation and high-quality information in an easy-to-use solution, visit www.kronos.com.

© 2009 Kronos Incorporated. Kronos is a registered trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Source: Kronos

Tags: Kronos

Kronos Retail Labor Index(TM) Indicates Signs of Recovery in U.S. Retail Hiring

New Index Shows Retail Hiring Up 9 Percent from Three-Year Low in January 2009

CHELMSFORD, Mass. (September 08, 2009) –

Kronos® Incorporated today unveiled the first installment of the Kronos Retail Labor Index(TM), a family of metrics and indices that analyze the relationship between the demand and supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector. The Kronos Retail Labor Index provides a distinct and early indicator of the overall state of the retail sector. The report will be available on a monthly basis. The September report, a schedule of upcoming Index release dates, the methodology, and downloadable graphics are available on the Kronos Retail Labor Index website.
News Facts

* There are four related measures of interest in the report:

* The Kronos Retail Labor Index: This metric is defined as the percentage of job applications that result in a hiring, normalized within a scale of 0 to 100. For example, a rate of 2.75 percent means that per 100 job applications received, 2.75 of them resulted in a hire.

o The Kronos Retail Labor Index decreased fairly steadily from 7.1 percent in October 2006 to a three-year low of 2.75 percent in January 2009.
o Between January and July 2009, the Kronos Retail Labor Index increased slightly to 2.99 percent, a relative improvement of 4 percent from 2.88 percent in June.
o The figure of 2.99 percent represents a 9-percent increase in the job application to hiring ratio relative to the lowest recorded level of 2.75 percent in January 2009. While showing a small but steady improvement over the last six months, the July number is significantly below the three-year high of 7.1 percent recorded in October 2006.

* Retail Applications Level: During the first seven months of 2009, the 68 retailers who make up the Kronos sample received 8.9 million job applications, a 12 percent increase over the same period in 2008 and a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2007.
* Retail Hiring Level: Of the 15 million applications received by these retailers during the last 12 months (August 2008 through July 2009), 529,000 resulted in hires. This represents a 28 percent reduction in hirings compared to the prior 12 months (August 2007 through July 2008).
* Retail Employee Retention Rate: Consistently declining rates of retention on a year-over-year basis between late-2006 and mid-2007 have been followed by a steady and much larger increase in retention in 2008 and 2009.

Supporting Quotes

* Dr. Robert Yerex, Ph.D., chief economist, Kronos
“It was encouraging to see the Kronos Retail Labor Index increase to 2.99 percent in July – up 4 percent from June. We believe this stabilization and tentative recovery in the Index signals the beginning of stabilization in the overall U.S. economy and will be reflected in other measures of the economy in the coming months.”
* Aron Ain, chief executive officer, Kronos
“In the past, bits and pieces of information about the hiring climate were available from various sources, but never in a comprehensive way. The Kronos Retail Labor Index is derived from one unified data set and is based on actual hiring transactions, as opposed to surveys about transactions. Our hiring solution processed more than 23 million applications in 2008. This volume of data combined with our expertise in analytics and economics enables Kronos to analyze hiring-related trends in the retail sector in a way that no one else can.”
* Dr. John Gallup, assistant professor of economics, Portland State University
“Economists, among many other groups of people, are always looking for new leading economic indicators. Analysis of the past several years has shown that the Kronos Retail Labor Index has consistently foreshadowed changes that revealed themselves in other indicators weeks or months later. Given this history, I believe the Kronos Retail Labor Index could be an important leading economic indicator for the retail sector moving forward.”
* Lisa Rowan, program director, HR, learning and talent strategies, IDC
“The time is right for a seasoned entity in retail hiring to launch an index like the Kronos Retail Labor Index, given the current state of the economy and the increasing interest in trying to find better predictors of what will happen. This is a very interesting way to use data in its aggregate form to provide the public-at-large with a useful and meaningful new measure of the economy.”

Supporting Resources

* Organizations that use Kronos hiring solutions employ approximately 15 percent of the U.S. consumer retail labor market, providing Kronos with a unique set of data on employee job applications, hirings, and length of service.
* The Kronos Retail Labor Index will be released on a monthly basis. Go to www.kronos.com/retail-labor-index to access: the full report; a schedule of upcoming Index release dates; the Index methodology; and downloadable graphics.
* To listen to an Audio News Release about the Kronos Retail Labor Index go to: http://www.kronos.com/Audio/KRONOS-W2.mp3
* Note to reporters: cite Index findings as “Kronos Retail Labor Index”.

About the Kronos Retail Labor Index

The Kronos Retail Labor Index is a family of metrics and indices that analyze the relationship between the demand and the supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector. It is derived from a single, unified data set, allowing for statistically appropriate comparisons and time series-based trending analysis. Firms that use Kronos hiring solutions employ approximately 15 percent of the U.S. consumer retail labor market, providing Kronos with a unique set of data on employee job applications, hirings, and length of service. The Kronos Retail Labor Index provides a distinct and early indicator of the health of the retail sector.
About Kronos Incorporated

Kronos is the global leader in workforce management solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000® — use Kronos time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications. To learn how Kronos uniquely delivers complete automation and high-quality information in an easy-to-use solution, visit www.kronos.com.

© 2009 Kronos Incorporated. Kronos is a registered trademark and Kronos Retail Labor Index is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Source: Kronos

Tags: Kronos

“Productivity Drain” Survey Finds That Many Employees Feel Productivity was a Casualty of the Recession

A new survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute� at Kronos® Incorporated and conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that 40 percent of respondents whose workplaces experienced layoffs in the past year feel that the overall productivity of their organization has been negatively impacted

CHELMSFORD, Mass. (August 26, 2009) –

A new survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute(TM) at Kronos® Incorporated and conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that 40 percent of respondents whose workplaces experienced layoffs in the past year feel that the overall productivity of their organization has been negatively impacted. The “Productivity Drain” survey examines what this means for employees and what they think their employers should be doing to be positioned for success as the economy rebounds.
News Facts

* 38 percent of respondents employed full or part-time said there had been layoffs in the past year at their primary place of employment.
* Of those respondents who said that productivity had been negatively impacted by layoffs:
o 66 percent said that morale has suffered and people are less motivated;
o 64 percent said that there is too much work and not enough people to do it;
o 37 percent said the wrong people or departments were laid off, leaving inefficient systems and workflows; and
o 36 percent said they are concerned that as the economy picks up, they won’t have the right resources to meet demand.
* Despite feeling overworked, a surprising majority — 53 percent — of respondents said they felt the right number of people were laid off at their organization. Thirty-two percent said they felt too many were laid off and seven percent said not enough were laid off.
* Employees also have some advice for employers on how to improve productivity in their workplace:
o 50 percent said employers should look for ways to improve morale;
o 46 percent said their employers have processes that should be automated to be more efficient;
o 36 percent said their organizations should invest in new technology to help manage productivity — interestingly enough, more men (42 percent) than women (30 percent) believe this would help; and
o 36 percent of employees believe that organizations need to take a fresh look at how to redistribute the workload among those employees who are left.

Supporting Quotes

* Joyce Maroney, director of The Workforce Institute, Kronos
“In the midst of a downturn like the one we are experiencing, the time is right for employers to re-examine existing practices: from how work is distributed among the organization; to whether or not new hires need to be made; to what kinds of technology might enable the workforce to become more productive. In this survey, we hear loud and clear from employees that these issues need to be addressed now, so that businesses are positioned for success when the economy kicks back into high gear.”
* Andy Brantley, president and chief executive officer of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources
“No one would argue that the last several months have been incredibly difficult for most organizations. Employees who ‘survive’ layoffs are left with more work and fewer resources. Employers should look for ways to keep employees focused on contributing to the success of the organization while providing them with rewards and recognition for the exceptional work being done under difficult circumstances.”

Supporting Resources

* About Harris Interactive

Survey Methodology

This survey was conducted via telephone within the U.S. by Harris Interactive® on behalf of The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated between August 13 and August 16, 2009 among a nationwide sample of 2,005 U.S. adults aged 18 and over among whom 956 were employed full-time or part-time. Data were weighted to be representative of the total U.S. adult population on the basis of age, sex, geographic region, and race.
About The Workforce Institute

The Workforce Institute was founded by Kronos Incorporated in 2006 as a think tank to provide research and education on critical workplace issues facing organizations around the globe. By bringing together thought leaders, The Workforce Institute is uniquely positioned to empower organizations with the knowledge and information they need to manage their workforce effectively and provide a voice for employees on important workplace issues. A hallmark of The Workforce Institute’s research is balancing the needs and desires of diverse employee populations with the needs of organizations. For additional information, visit www.workforceinstitute.org.
About Kronos Incorporated

Kronos is the global leader in workforce management solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000® — use Kronos time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications. To learn how Kronos uniquely delivers complete automation and high-quality information in an easy-to-use solution, visit www.kronos.com.

© 2009 Kronos Incorporated. Kronos is a registered trademark and The Workforce Institute is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Source: Kronos

Tags: Kronos