Kronos Workforce Central - Works even in the Bush of Alaska
Updated June 03, 2015
Kronos Workforce Central - Works even in the Bush of Alaska
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
7
Modules Used
- Time and Attendance
- HR
- Payroll
Overall Satisfaction with Workforce Central
Workforce Central was used throughout our organization, which encompassed our main hospital in Bethel, Alaska as well as 50 village clinics that were spread-out across the "bush" of western Alaska. The business problem that Workforce Central addressed was the HR / Payroll and Time & Attendance management of our employees, regardless of the location of the staff. Considering that we had no road connecting our main hospital in Bethel to our village clinics, the accurate management of these functions with an electronic system was imperative for accurate and timely payroll.
- Time and Attendance integration is exceptional, whether using time clocks on online clocking capabilities at off-site locations that lack physical time clocks
- The ability to track details from an HR perspective, such as educational requirements (and expirations), immunization status, etc was well built
- Security is very granular, so you can give certain users access to certain pieces of the application, while maintaining security in other areas.
- Administration of the system is complex. There is no way that an organization with no formal IT department will be able to effectively able to manage the complexity of the system without some outside assistance. This wasn't a problem for our organization as we had a large, formal IT department, but we had four people involved in the build process and one person dedicating approximately 30% of their time to the day-to-day management of the system.
- The server requirements are extremely robust for the system, utilizing more resources than I really think should be required. Although the system does support virtualization, you have to dedicate a significant amount of CPU and memory to each virtual machine to obtain peak performance.
- Although you can import data from an extract, this is complex to do. Even if you have someone who is a SQL (this is the version we used) expert, developing importation scripts is difficult. Most likely, if you are doing a switch from a previous system, you will need third party assistance to develop the import / validation scripts.
- We were able to completely do away with a number of paper forms once we rolled out the online capabilities for staff to update information and gather their own pay stubs and W-2 forms.
- Locations that previously relied on paper timecards were able to use online clocking to clock in and out, eliminating a lot of effort and creating a much more efficient system, without having to purchase time-clocks for each of these locations.
- HR was able to eliminate a number of Access and home-built databases and now store all of that data within the single Workforce Central application.
Workforce Central was our selection because it capable of being virtualized (using VMWare), utilized SQL as the back-end database versus Oracle (which was cheaper to license and talent was easier to find), and because the price-point beat out their competitors. We did end up spending more money than anticipated on consulting services, but that was due to continual changes to the project scope as more features were found to be useful.
Using Workforce Central
Workforce Central Implementation
- Professional services company