Shenandoah University Takes Workforce Management to the Cloud With This Solution

Comprehensive Solutions For a Complete Advantage

After a thorough review process, we selected Kronos Incorporated and its Workforce Central solution.

While the decision was made in part because Demetrius Carmichael, our Associate Vice President of Administration and Finance was familiar with the system—it was really the strength of the solution, its integrated solutions, and the fact that it was cloud-based that put it to the top of the list.

This “end-to-end” workforce management solution successfully automated all of the processes related to time and attendance, leave management and payroll.

Employees on the system now enter their time in the application and their data is immediately captured and stored. The system then automatically rounds employees’ time using our rounding rules, applies any additional pay rules, and calculates pay. It also manages employees’ leave and vacation balances. Plus, it’s all in one database, which makes it easy for IT to support and maintain.

By eliminating the need to re-key paper timecards, the overall quality and accuracy of data have improved, which has led to less payroll errors and reduced compliance risk. Productivity has soared, too, especially in payroll.

“The time-savings have been significant,” Sowder says. “It now takes far less time to respond to employee questions since all of the data is right there in the system.”

One of the biggest benefits of this solution is how it has helped payroll increase the accuracy of employees’ time and attendance data.

“Our data is much more accurate,” Nelson says. “For example, if an employee really starts a shift at 9:07 a.m., we know it’s exactly this time, not 9:00 a.m. or 9:15 a.m. It is important for us to have this level of accuracy, both to manage costs, pay employees fairly, save time applying those changes, and avoid future errors.”

At the same time, HR and payroll has gained real-time visibility into employees’ timecards.

“This is another significant advantage,” Nelson says. “If there’s a question, we can look at an employee’s timecard right now to see the data in question, not days or weeks later. We have been able to save a lot of time in the payroll process, and we can be much more proactive in helping employees manage their time. We are also much more efficient—and effective—in responding to any questions employees may have.”

Nelson and Sowder both report that these time-savings have enabled them to take on new responsibilities, such as focusing on this data to improve compliance efforts with federal regulations.

“We have more time to focus on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and other federal regulations to make sure we’re in compliance,” Sowder says. “Before we had this workforce management solution, we would have needed full-time consultants to help us in this area. This is another big advantage to the system.”