Workforce Central® Proves to be the Cure for Sisters of Charity
Business type: Healthcare provider
Product: Workforce Central suite, Kronos 4500™ badge terminals
Employees: 3,000
Locations: 5
The Sisters of Charity and Holy Spirit Health Service is a comprehensive healthcare provider with locations in Brisbane, Australia. With four hospitals, several aged care satellite facilities, 3,000 employees, and labour expenses of more than 75 percent of its total operating expenses, Sisters of Charity realised that it needed a labour management solution that could provide greater insight and control.
Sisters of Charity selected and implemented Kronos’ Workforce Central suite to automate its entire labour management process. As a result, Sisters of Charity streamlined critical processes, increased overall productivity, reduced payroll errors — and payroll
costs — and achieved other significant benefits along the way.
The headaches of a manual system
Before implementing Workforce Central, Sisters of Charity relied on a variety of manual and automated systems to achieve its labour management objectives. For example, Sisters of Charity used a paper-based, often error-prone, system for collecting and processing employees’ time and attendance data at some sites, as well as a separate, custom-built rostering system for creating employee schedules at other sites. These systems were not integrated, so valuable labour data resided in separate databases. As a result, labour reporting, such as budgeting and trend analysis, was difficult and time-consuming.
Jo Butler, project officer at Sisters of Charity, remembers just how difficult the old systems were. “Using a manual time and attendance system created too many payroll errors,” she says, recalling that they used to average 50 errors each payroll period.
Ms. Butler describes the old process at one facility. “Employees had to complete and submit paper-based timesheets each week,” she says. “Then managers had to review them and fix any errors they found before passing them along to payroll for coding, processing, and payment.” This type of system proved to be very inefficient and led to wasted time and decreased productivity, for employees and managers alike. Unfortunately, all the facilities had similar stories. Having no uniformity of product or process meant having very little control.
It also wasted money. “With more than 50 errors per payroll period, we were spending far too much time fixing errors, and in extreme cases, we were even overpaying employees,” says Ms. Butler. “All of this led to inflated labour costs and wasted money. We needed a labour management system that gave us accountability.”
Sisters of Charity uncovers an effective solution
The process began with an exhaustive search for the best labour management vendor. After a thorough research process, Sisters of Charity decided Kronos and its flagship Workforce Central suite was the best solution for its needs.
Planning for the actual implementation uncovered a few additional challenges too. “We discovered that we had more than 500 pay rules!” recalls Leona Brouff, payroll business unit manager at Sisters of Charity. “Most of them were created from handshake agreements that existed in our different sites, but the net result was that we did not have a uniform way of paying employees across the entire organisation.”
Fortunately, Workforce Central addressed the challenges Sisters of Charity was facing. “We eliminated some of these rules and created a new set of standardised pay rules,” explains Ms. Butler. “Workforce Central is capable of handling it all for us automatically.”
What this means is that the Workforce Timekeeper™ application, the integral time and attendance application within the Workforce Central suite, applies Sisters of Charity’s pay rules to employees’ labour data — more quickly, accurately, and consistently across the entire organisation. This information is then fed directly to payroll. It’s fast, easy, and very effective. “Since implementing, we’ve seen our payroll errors go down from 50 to less than 10 per payroll,” says Ms. Brouff, admitting that most of those errors were due to some internal glitches. “Those kinds of results translate into real savings.”
Additional challenges
Sisters of Charity also discovered that its employees were more than just a little resistant to change. When preparing to install 26 Kronos 4500™ badge terminals that employees would use for swiping in and out, Ms. Butler and Ms. Brouff heard a few grumbles. “We encountered some resistance,” recalls Ms. Butler. “At first our staff didn’t like the perceived stigma of timeclocks and definitely didn’t like the idea of ‘corporate’ telling them what to do.”
The solution? They ensured that the staff were communicated with regularly and encouraged them to embrace the change with a positive attitude, which gave them a sense of ownership. In return, the terminals, or “I-pay devices” as Sisters of Charity dubbed them, were viewed as a positive symbol of change — a tool they could use to assure themselves accurate and reliable paychecks. Once they started seeing results, such as consistently accurate paychecks, the grumbles soon died down. The nurses are now looking forward to the new rostering tools provided in the next release.
Workforce Central provides a one stop solution
Ms. Butler and Ms. Brouff give Workforce Central high marks for both the benefits it has provided and its architecture. For example, one centralised database has improved the way
managers access and use employee labour data. “Overtime, schedules, accruals, even holidays – it’s all just a click away,” says Ms. Brouff.
Workforce Central offers other valuable tools for the managers’ benefit too. Managers use HyperFind™ queries and Workforce Genie™ shortcuts to streamline common management tasks, view employee exceptions, and increase efficiencies so, as Ms. Butler says, “they can get back to what’s really important — taking care of patients.”
And because Workforce Central is Web-based, labour reports can be compiled and viewed in real time so managers can act on the information as it happens. No more batch processing or
spreadsheet reports produced after the fact. Sisters of Charity’s managers are now armed with real-time labour data for achieving bottom-line results.
Solving agency staffing problems
One significant example of achieving bottom-line savings is demonstrated by the way Workforce Central helps Sisters of Charity manage its use of agency labour. Because of Australia’s nursing shortage, Sisters of Charity and other healthcare organisations used to rely on agency labour to help them through staffing shortfalls. At certain times, agency labour could be as
much as 30 percent of the organisation’s staff, which represents
a very significant expense.
But with real-time insight into staffing and overtime levels and other key indicators, Sisters of Charity has improved its use of agency labour. “We’ve been able to gain a complete understanding of our agency usage and are now in a position to make substantial savings based on accurate data,” says Ms. Butler.
Now, as Sisters of Charity looks to the future, it will be implementing Kronos’ Visionware® solution, a labour analytics solution that will continue to help the organisation balance full-time and agency staff, monitor productivity levels in real time, and improve labour productivity and efficiency.
For Sisters of Charity, Workforce Central proved to be the cure for its labour management needs. Automating previously manual systems helped Sisters of Charity eliminate waste, increase productivity, reduce labour costs, and make decisions that will have a long-term impact on the bottom line. And for Ms. Brouff, Workforce Central has made administering and processing payroll faster and easier so she can play a more strategic role in the organisation. And according to Ms. Brouff that is “an absolute dream.”
