From Ascentis, NOVAtime was a set of workforce management solutions providing timekeeping, payroll, leave management, and employee scheduling needs. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and along with NOVAtime, will be discontinued.
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UKG Workforce Central (discontinued)
Score 6.5 out of 10
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UKG Workforce Central (formerly Kronos Workforce Central) was a suite of HR Management offerings targeted mainly at enterprise customers with larger-scale and more complex HR and workforce management issues. The product is discontinued.
We continue to remain the only professional baseball team that utilizes NOVAtime for our scheduling of staff, mostly because it was designed to schedule hospital workers. The lag time when updating the ASM is extremely time consuming and the inability to work in multiple internet tabs or windows makes it that much more inefficient. I am sure it is a fantastic system for other organizations but it continues to be a challenge for us.
This product was marketed to us as a school and several schools in our area use the program. However, the implementation team we were set-up with had limited school experience and we are still working on the best way to do some of the timekeeping issues where I know that could have been handled better. That being said from a payroll and reporting side it has been great to capture so much data (at times almost too much) and have the system do automatic allocations of salaries and general ledger reports. The reporting takes some getting used to, but overall I've been able to run reports to see and track just about anything I want. Our employees also love the self service compared to our previous products where they can make W4, direct deposit and other updates on their own without having to get HR involved.
I personally feel like timekeeping is very well thought out and has some powerful tools built in. There is a bit of a learning curve but with strategically placed SMEs we were able to get the use and functionality we needed out of the system.
Workforce planning has been crucial in planning operational support in our retail and customer service centers. It is also editable and modifiable as needed.
There does need to be more support and knowledge when it comes to alternate workweek schedule types (9/80, etc.), as there have been a few unique challenges with those.
The overall satisfaction within the organization has been luke warm, at best. The software may be more conducive for a hospital but I believe there is a reason why we are the lone baseball team utilizing it.
Now that the system is installed and operational, the "pain is gone"...therefore we see no reason to change to a different application. There is no functionality that is missing from the system that would drive us to consider another solution at this time. Maintenance support from Kronos is sufficient and updates occur regularly.
On the employee's side of things, Novatime is pretty intuitive and fairly easy to use. All they have to do is either press a button to punch in or punch out. If they are entering in their hours, all they have to do is type in the number of hours per day. On the manager's side of things, Novatime is also fairly easy to use. It highlights in red any missed punches and in green any OT that the employee has. There are links on the homepage of the manager's page that will lead them to a list of all their employees' missed punches for a pay period and they can fix them all before payroll is due. Novatime becomes a bit more complicated on the administrator's side. The issues I have run into with Novatime normally come after updates/upgrades to their system. They have been getting better, but the administrator's side is still a bit clunky and takes a while to find what you are looking for. It is not as intuitive as the other sides and takes a bit of computer knowledge to figure it out.
The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with. The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information. It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts. Processing payroll is quite simple. PTO request off is straightforward.
Having no experience with Kronos prior to using it in March 2016, their customer service team taught me how to use it the right way after my initial training at work. I am well-versed in data analysis using Excel and Access primarily, so once I discovered that Kronos had a reporting feature built in, I've used the feature quite a few times to help our properties evaluate their production costs and make good labor decisions. I give Kronos a 10 because once a person takes the time to learn how to use the software, they'll realize that Kronos is far more effective than most, and gives users more ways to access their information where and when they want to.
Kronos and Dayforce are the two timekeeping systems I’ve worked with in recent years. Kronos feels a little more comprehensive and is my primary timekeeping tool both for myself as well as my staff. Kronos is a great tool for a wide range of shifts, working locations, and pay codes. In this context, I would pick Kronos over Dayforce. On the opposite side, Dayforce is extremely user-friendly and has a “cleaner” user interface if that is a contributing factor for anyone. Also, for managers who oversee large teams (30-50 team members) then Dayforce is a bit more simple to approve time cards, hours, and leave. Kronos is a bit clunky with all the clicks, and managing large teams of hourly employees would be a huge time suck to go in to review/approve all.
Kronos is much more expensive than the previous systems we were using, so at this point the ROI is negative. The idea is that it will allow us to scale and grow the company more easily so time will tell if that is the case.
