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 5.2 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.
NOVAtime is an excellent choice for employers who need a timekeeping solution with an easy-to-use and understand user interface, great user experience, and great support from the Ascentis user support teams.
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.
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.
There are easy ways you can transfer a manager's caseload/employees to another manager temporarily if that person is going to be out of the office for an extended period of time without giving away too much personal information - just what would be needed for payroll or time off requests (this can be customized by your administrator).
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.
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.
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.
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.
They actually ended up joining forces to make one platform for all timekeeping solutions. With Novatime and all other modules we have from Ascentis, everything flows very easily.
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.
