Paper-based scheduling perishable with uncommon labor exceptions

The complexities of scheduling labor with myriad skills is difficult for Seattle's National Frozen Foods Co., where seasonal employees are working on a product just slightly less perishable than ice cream.

In a six-month period, weather decides when vegetable crops are ripe for harvest in the Oregon and Washington fields. Crops then move off farms and into National's three processing plants, sometimes on an hour's notice.

"When the crop is ready really determines when each shift starts and ends," explains Michele Cyrus, National's project lead for a new PC-based scheduling solution.

In addition, National has to contend with an employment force that swells from 500 to 1,500 from May through late November. National's HR staff found itself working seven days a week processing payroll and juggling labor.

National's challenge was integrating the hundreds of nonstandard labor demands—such as seasonal workers wanting to work on a corn packaging line but not on a carrot line—with the requirements of two labor unions and National's own work rules.

National already has an Adage ERP suite from Agilisys covering plant and administrative operations. John Meersman, National's director of IT, built the company's "Growers" IT system, which tracks field yields from farms it employs. But timekeeping was done in a time-card system left over from the early 20^th century.

National's labor scheduling system, ostensibly built on spreadsheets, was, in reality, composed of scraps of paper and hundreds of variables and exceptions locked in the memories of three harried schedulers. Without an easily transferable system, the schedulers couldn't get sick or take a day off during peak harvest times.

National brought in payroll software from enterprise labor management applications vendor Kronos. After a season of tinkering, the Kronos application pared three days off the payroll accounting time.

In March, National ended its beta test of Kronos' new roles-based scheduler that released nationally in April. The software first identifies work that's coming and, based on scoring algorithms, lists who's available for the task—taking into account union and internal rules.

The complete Kronos applications suite can cost between $50 to $200 per employee, according to Kronos, but the scheduling module alone can be integrated into legacy payroll and scheduling systems.

"National's main goal with all of our software is to customize as little as possible," says Cyrus. "So we try our hardest to use the software as it is written. There are a few places the new scheduler needs improvement with regard to preferences. One of the things we have done to overcome these issues was to get involved with Kronos [and its user group]. We're sharing ways to make it better for all of us. Kronos has been very open in listening to new ideas and making improvements with its software."

As a private company, Meersman wouldn't detail costs or savings with the original timekeeping system, but he says with assurance that with the labor scheduling module, "Schedulers will now be able to take a day off."