Goninan Payroll Rolls Smoothly with Kronos®

Cuts payroll processing time by 50 percent

To optimise its payroll system and improve tracking of project-related labour expenditures, heavy engineering company A. Goninan & Co. Ltd is rolling out the Kronos Time & Attendance application across its 16 Australian offices.

Newcastle-based Goninan is one of Australia's largest manufacturers of locomotives, passenger trains and rolling stock, with nearly 2000 employees working at plants stretching from Perth to Townsville. As 1800 of these staff work regular rostered shifts, keeping track of the hours they put in with timesheets and timecards was a laborious, error-prone task. "It was extremely labour-intensive, and led to discrepancies when payroll staff interpreted overtime and other penalties differently. It was also hard to track where our labour was being spent," explained Darren Robson, Group Manager, Systems with Goninan.

Goninan initially deployed Kronos into two of its Perth plants and its Sydney plant. Several timeclocks with built-in barcode readers were installed throughout each site, and employees were given barcoded ID cards. Workers swipe the card through the time clock at the beginning and end of each shift, providing Kronos with information on their hours and on what project they worked. The data is then fed into Goninan's MicroPay payroll system, which deposits salaries directly into workers' bank accounts.

Using the Kronos system has given Goninan a much more consistent and streamlined payroll system that eliminates pay discrepancies caused by differing interpretations of awards and has cut the resources and time needed for payroll processing by 50 percent.

Robson pointed out that technology was only one part of the process of computerising Goninan's payroll systems. "The biggest issue was earning the trust of the people on the factory floor so they understood that management was not trying to crack down on our employees," he said. "We implemented the Kronos system to help us rationalise the number of payrolls we run across the company without losing control of the hours in our costing and production control systems. It has given management better daily control of our projects."

Since its introduction two years ago, Kronos has helped Goninan significantly improve its payroll process and get better visibility of its labour expenditures by project. The success of the project has guaranteed Kronos a long-term place within Goninan's computing infrastructure. "We see Kronos as an integral part of the system structure of a Goninan site," Robson said. "It's part of the basic suite of software we use to set up a location."