Kronos Incorporated, the global leader in delivering workforce management solutions in the cloud, today unveiled a major new version of its flagship product suite, Workforce Central. Workforce Central 8 combines a reimagined user experience with unmatched industry-specific functionality, powerful analytics, comprehensive global capabilities, and proven cloud delivery for a complete, uncompromised solution that allows organisations to control labour costs, minimise compliance risk, improve workforce productivity, and increase employee engagement – regardless of their industry or where they do business. 

News Facts

· Reimagined user experience – Designed for the needs and expectations of an increasingly diverse, multi-generational global workforce, Workforce Central 8 sets a new standard for ease of use with:

o    An engaging and innovative look and feel that leverages HTML5 technology for efficient and intuitive navigation;

o    An enhanced timecard that is both configurable and actionable, simplifying completion of routine tasks and access to critical employee information;

o    A reimagined schedule planner that delivers exceptional visibility to staffing and coverage with many new features, including employee photos, colour coding of jobs, and flexible multi-week calendar views;

o    New Workforce Genies that allow managers to easily access, group, filter, and summarise operational data;

o    Simplified historical correction capabilities that provide a seamless and secure process for viewing and editing missed punches, pay codes, and other details from previous periods;

o    Enhanced mobile capabilities that enable offline punching, hourly and project timecard editing, notification alerts, and management of time-off requests; and

o    Flexible open-shift management that enables managers to easily and automatically create and notify employees of open shifts on approval of time-off requests.

·  Exceptional features for every industry – Organisations should not have to compromise on functionality, integration, or performance when meeting the demanding needs of their specific industries. In addition to innovative features such as Leaderboardsand Grant and Project Tracking, Workforce Central 8 enables enhanced business outcomes with features designed to increase productivity, improve employee engagement, and deliver a better customer experience:

o Enhanced employee self-service scheduling provides visibility into location schedules and coverage. Employees can now review assigned shifts, check coverage by job role, and request open shifts in a familiar weekly or monthly calendar view;

o New fatigue management capabilities enable managers to track, alert, and adjust schedules to avoid the use of over-worked employees and the safety hazards, employee dissatisfaction, and reduced productivity associated with work fatigue;

o Managers can make more efficient scheduling and staffing decisions using predictive on-screen reporting of projected overtime and alerts to related rule violations;

o Retailers and hospitality providers can improve productivity and customer satisfaction with:

·  New task management features that provide a more granular view of labour required for customer-facing, non-customer-facing, and programme-oriented tasks, allowing store managers to make better staffing decisions; and

·  Current week re-forecasting analyses actual sales and customer traffic data to suggest midweek adjustments to sales projections and staffing levels due to unforeseen influences such as weather, local events, or other unusual activity.      

o Advanced staffing and predictive scheduling capabilities enable healthcare organisations to improve staff satisfaction and deliver quality patient care all while managing labour costs:

· Predictive volume forecasting measures historical performance and current patient flow to determine optimal staffing requirements; and

· Workload management considers the demand for care with each patient’s level-of-care intensity while equitably distributing and balancing staff assignments; and

· Shift-based productivity tracking helps healthcare organisations manage in-the-moment by showing real-time variances from planned performance.

· Unparalleled business insight with reporting and analytics – Workforce Central 8 can reveal the underlying truths in an organisation’s transactional workforce data to identify and help resolve complex labour cost, compliance, and productivity issues with:     

o Operational reporting through convenient Excel-based scheduling and timekeeping report templates that allow user modification to meet specific business needs;

o Interactive visualisation that highlights labour patterns and trends using geospatial analysis, while incorporating additional data sources, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or point-of-sale (POS) systems;

o Actionable insight to reveal trends in employee attendance, unplanned absence, and related actions, with ability to segment by multiple dimensions, such as labour account, job, and tenure;

o Industry-specific insight that provides greater visibility into how effectively organisations plan, schedule, and manage labour spend against customer demand, patient needs, and client requirements; and

o Workforce Analytics Plug-ins developed by Kronos and select partners using Workforce Central and third-party data to deliver better insight into critical business needs. Plug-ins include Store Performance; Workforce to Workload; Labour Cost Variance; and Retail IQ.

· Enhanced global capabilities – Kronos continues to extend competencies to meet the stringent requirements of organisations worldwide including:

o Compliance support at the country-, regional-, county-, union- and city-level to help organisations manage the myriad of ever-changing compliance requirements related to working time, reporting, and other regulations; and

o New international scheduling rules and alerts that enable organisations to comply with country-specific legislation, collective agreements, and company policies that specify limits for total hours worked over variable periods of time.

· Proven cloud delivery – Kronos continues to add thousands of customers to the Kronos Cloud, with more than 80 percent of new customer bookings leveraging an array of Kronos Cloud offerings.

 Supporting Quotes

· Aron Ain, chief executive officer, Kronos

“I am really proud of our interaction design, product, and cloud development teams for delivering the most user-friendly and powerful workforce management solution in the world. Not only have we capitalised on our expertise gained from thousands of successful Workforce Central implementations, but we also engaged our largest-ever group of customer advisory board members. Their suggestions, guidance, and feedback were instrumental to this effort and continue to inspire us to deliver the best workforce management solutions – without compromise.”

· Mark Smith, chief executive officer and executive vice president of research, Ventana Research

“Workforce management is not just about time and attendance – as many ERP and HCM application vendors would like for you to believe – but is a collection of applications that help organisations manage and optimize the hourly workforce to its fullest potential. Workforce management requires many capabilities but also includes self-service access for employees and managers, digital timecards, dynamic scheduling, geo-fenced check-in, work collaboration, task management, and many other areas that are all part of Kronos Workforce Central 8.”

 Supporting Resources

·  Watch a video about Workforce Central 8.

·  Take a look at the lighter side of workforce management in our Time Well Spent cartoons, including an animated cartoon about the launch of Workforce Central 8.

·  Connect with Kronos via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

·  Subscribe to our workforce management blogs.