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 use Kronos Workforce Central only for it's timekeeping and scheduling/forecasting capabilities. It absolutely meets our needs for these areas. The reporting functionality also serves us well; exporting reports in excel covers the needs for most teams that use the system. Finally, business leaders and local HR crews are able to run reports on the teams they support.
As a full service hospital there can be demands of staff to respond to high census or staffing shortages. Kronos has offered great utilization in floating hours between units and departments, identifying direct or indirect patient care hours, and ultimately offering analytics to clinical and operational leaders. This ability to specifically move hours while at work is exceptional for reporting and planning purposes across the organization.
The self-managed and leader managed options of an employee’s time card is of huge benefit. As a 24/7 hour operation it is critical that each individual is accountable for their own timekeeping. Kronos allows each employee to manage and submit adjustment, updates, and changes while at work without having to have their manager do it for them. The proceeding approval/acceptance process with these changes is well established and easy to authenticate.
The ability to access and navigate the user interface is very friendly and forgiving. Other systems can be quite cumbersome and hard to navigate, update, and easily change, but Kronos is pretty straight forward both for users and administrators. This ability to easily orient new team members and managers has been a great benefit to the organization.
Training required to use the product effectively, not simple at first
Dependent on Java, frequent updates to Java necessary to continue using the Kronos platform
Reporting tools are extensive and solid, though some reports can only be extracted in PDF, not in the more usable Excel format. How Kronos determines which can be extracted in Excel vs. PDF, I can't tell.
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.
Kronos Workforce Central's support is amazing! From the support the software alone gives our department to the customer service team, we have never been more thorough as we are now. There are plenty of trainings provided and assistance is always there when you need it. The launching process was very detailed.
We looked this product first and actually started the conversion process before we realized it could not do some essential functions we needed. One of the simple ones was allowing for employees to select to clock in or out and not just assume the direction based on their schedule or last punch. With bus drivers working multiple routes or shifts this was imperative that they be able to select this as while they may forget one punch being able to select the direction helps identify where the missing punches are. I'm hoping this has since been corrected because it absolutely floored me that such a relatively simple thing was not an option.
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.
