Time & attendance specialist Kronos serves up manufacturing-focused workforce management solution

Most people know the name Kronos for human capital management, and its widely adopted time & attendance solutions. But as David Caruso, principal of Caruso & Associates, a Mass.-based manufacturing system consulting practice, puts it, “Kronos could be one of the fun stories of 2007. It's breaking the mold in the space it's in, and doing something different. I think what they're doing will blow people away.”

What Kronos is doing is verticalizing—that is, diving deeper into key market segments where it has been strong. It started with retail and health care, but the end of January, it announced Kronos for Manufacturing, a system that can fully account for labor hours associated with specific work orders, making it possible to accurately and precisely reconcile variances between shift hours and time spent actually working.

What's more, the solution also serves as a shop-floor data collection system, for work-in-process tracking that can trigger workflow-enabled alerts when sequenced tasks fall behind schedule.

“In manufacturing, we've nailed down physical processes and we know how to track and trace what we produce,” Caruso says. “The question is how can we improve the performance of the people who are carrying out these activities? Kronos is in a position to start correlating key activities and delivering diagnostics in the factory that bring the picture together in a holistic fashion not seen before.”

Gregg Gordon, Kronos global process leader for manufacturing, says the vendor has gone beyond hanging clocks on the wall.

“Our applications have grown up real-time,” says Gordon. “We offer integrated applications that manage wages, time, and the skill workers bring to the job. We can track as little or as much as you want and we can reconcile it all in payroll.”

Gordon says these capabilities empower manufacturers to closely measure productivity—e.g., time actually devoted to a task—and make better decisions about prioritizing work.

Vivienne Kaminski is the payroll and HR information systems manager for Cleveland-based Shiloh, a metal components supplier to the automotive industry with 11 facilities and 2,200 employees.

“Parts of Shiloh have used Kronos since the 1980s, but we standardized on it in 2000,” she says. “It helps us manage our labor costs, where they're occurring, and on what projects on a real-time basis. It also helps us understand what kinds of costs go into our products, which figures big in our pricing—especially in deciding whether we can afford to make price concessions when our customers ask us, and knowing whether we can do it and still be profitable.”

Kronos helps Shiloh manage work schedules, helping determine whether to run another shift or work weekends, and maximizing individual skills and hours without accruing unnecessary overtime.

“It can vary by shifts, depending on what the needs are at the time,” explains Kaminski. “Kronos helps us make adjustments. It all gets audited back against what was forecast, and it all gets costed in the general ledger to the right job. Kronos has saved the company a lot of money managing the workforce automatically, and in real time.”