DeKalb County Enhances Workforce Productivity and Reduces Labor Costs with the Workforce Central^® Suite

 Download Printable Version

One of five counties in the Atlanta area, DeKalb County, Georgia has more than 7,000 employees in 185 locations and serves 676,000 residents. Its employees work in police services, the sheriff's department, fire and EMS, water and sewer, sanitation, roads and drainage, courts, administration, and more.

With such a wide array of employees, DeKalb County faced many challenges related to its payroll process. The key problem: Multiple methods for capturing time-related data and interfacing this information with its time and labor system.

The county found what it was looking for with Kronos' Workforce Timekeeper™ solution (a component of the Workforce Central^® suite). Implementing this powerful time and labor solution helped DeKalb County completely automate critical payroll processes to improve workforce productivity and decrease labor costs.

Room for improvement

Considering where DeKalb started, these results are even more impressive. Richard Gray, DeKalb's IS project manager, remembers life before Kronos. "Employees in our fire and sheriff's department and police services used to fill out paper timecards," he says. "Their supervisors had to collect, review, and approve them, and then key all of this information into our payroll system."

DeKalb also faced other challenges. "We had 43 different pay and work rules and a 28-day overtime payroll cycle for our fire and sheriff's department. Before Kronos, we had a hard time administering these policies consistently," Gray explains. "In addition, we were so decentralized it was hard to manage the entire process."

An automated time and labor solution

To address these issues, DeKalb turned to Kronos. The county had already implemented Kronos' Timekeeper Central^® solution for several departments more than 15 years ago, and it was fully committed to Kronos as its technology partner. So when Kronos launched its Web-based Workforce Central suite, DeKalb decided to upgrade. DeKalb County had all employees live on the Workforce Central suite in under nine months — an impressive installation time considering the implementation size and scope and the fact that a team of just two people was dedicated to the process.

Stone credits their Kronos consultant for their implementation success. "We worked closely with him to get all employees on the system — one group at a time — and test everything carefully before moving on," she says. Once all the employee data was on the test system, DeKalb grouped similar departments into phases, ran parallel payrolls for one or two pay periods, and went live.

DeKalb also completed extensive training. "It went exceptionally well," comments Stone. "We used Kronos training programs for our key users and IT staff, but trained most users internally so we could use our own data to make the experience much more relevant." Nearly 600 employees were trained in the process.

Improved workforce productivity

Using Workforce Timekeeper, DeKalb County sees many significant benefits. This powerful solution enabled DeKalb County to automate semi-manual systems and improve its overall payroll process. "Now, instead of filling out paper timecards, half of the employees just swipe an ID badge through a Kronos data collection terminal," Stone explains. Other employees are paid based on their scheduled hours, or they submit their time and labor information using the browser-based Workforce Employee™. "Their data is collected immediately and stored in a central database," says Stone.

As a result, the county saved considerable time and improved workforce productivity. "We save half a day on payroll," states Gray. "Before Kronos, information was always late, and there were too many corrections. It was a struggle to get payroll ready in time to produce the employees' checks," Gray recalls. "Now, with Workforce Timekeeper, once we have all the information, it only takes 30 minutes to get ready to run payroll."

The payroll workforce has also become more productive and data is more accurate. "Our payroll professionals review the information now instead of making last-minute changes or entering data," says Stone, noting that this has freed them to spend time on more strategic objectives. "In our police department alone, we used to have 10 payroll people keying and managing 1,800 employees' time entry. Now they spend more time focused on other tasks."

High-quality information reduces labor costs

With better access to critical data and more time to review it, the county's data is more accurate — and that has led to other benefits. "We have reduced the number of manual checks we write, which has reduced costs," says Stone. "And because employees' paychecks accurately reflect time worked, their confidence in the system has improved."

Stone gives another example of how Kronos helped the county improve its bottom line. "Workforce Timekeeper helped us notice a discrepancy in the way some employees were filling out overtime on their timesheets," she states. "As a result, we were able to identify many 15-minute increments that weren't really overtime; this helped us save a significant amount of money."

The road ahead

As DeKalb County continues to take advantage of Workforce Central, it has one eye fixed on the future. "We'd like to implement Workforce Accruals® to better manage employee leave time as well as other solutions for helping us comply with FMLA and other government regulations," says Gray.

"Workforce Timekeeper has given us an effective time and labor solution for a diverse group of employees," Stone concludes. "As a result, we have increased overall workforce productivity, empowered employees with more control over their information, and reduced labor costs in the process."

©2009, Kronos Incorporated. Kronos, Kronos logo, Workforce Central , and Workforce Accruals are registered trademarks, and Workforce Timekeeper, Workforce Employee, and Timekeeper Central are trademarks of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other product and company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be the trademarks of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change. All rights reserved.