Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Minimizes Compliance Risk, Improves Data With Kronos^®

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Socially responsible. Great place to work. And of course, passionate about creating rich, delicious coffee. All of these phrases describe Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc., a leader in the specialty coffee industry. The company offers more than 100 coffee selections under the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Newman's Own Organics brands. While the majority of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' $200 million revenue is derived from its wholesale operations, the company also operates a direct mail business and e-commerce Web site from its Waterbury, Vt., headquarters.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is committed to using innovative technology to support its business objectives and guiding principles, which include contributing at least 5 percent of the company's pretax profits to socially responsible initiatives. But the company couldn't effectively support its goals with its variety of workforce management systems, including outsourced payroll and some manual processes. This led to a host of issues. It was difficult for GMCR to manage its complex workforce. Control labor costs. Support corporate goals. And minimize its risk of noncompliance with state and federal regulations.

The answer? GMCR turned to the Kronos Workforce Central^® suite, including Workforce Timekeeper™, Workforce HR™, and Workforce Payroll™. This decision enabled the company to consolidate multiple systems and create best practices throughout the organization. With the help of Kronos, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is maintaining its enviable status as a high-performance organization — one that empowers employees, promotes social responsibility, and remains a highly desirable place to work.

A single solution delivers high-quality data

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' Kronos solution has its roots in the company's desire to bring its payroll system in-house to minimize the risk of noncompliance with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. After seeing the Workforce Central suite, GMCR realized Kronos could fulfill its needs in a number of ways. "We evaluated other vendors, and we felt that of all the products we saw, Kronos had the solution that would help us most," says Kathy Brooks, vice president of human resources and organizational development at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

Kronos allowed GMCR to reach its goal of consolidating all of its workforce management operations in a single solution. This new visibility and control has increased confidence in the data being used across the organization. "We used to have spreadsheets all over the company with different data," says Brooks. "Now we can be sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing."

Noncompliance risk down, HR efficiency up

High-quality, reliable data has also improved Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' compliance environment. "Kronos gives us better data that's more reliable, particularly for compliance with regulations such as those from Vermont OSHA and EEOC," says Brooks. The Kronos’ Workforce HR application was an important factor in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' decision to select Kronos. "Our previous HR system was simply too difficult to get up and running and too complex for people to manage," says Brooks. "Our HR functionality was always behind our operational functionality, and we found that we couldn’t be effective."

Doing well by doing good

One of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ guiding principles is social responsibility, particularly in the form of giving back to the communities in which it operates. In addition to the company's financial contributions to worthy organizations, employees are encouraged to perform volunteer work while on company time through the Community Action For Employees (CAFÉ) program. GMCR is looking forward to using its Kronos solution to help the company support these activities.

"One of the unique things about our company is that all of our employees have 52 hours a year of paid CAFÉ time to spend in charitable work of their choosing," says Brooks. "We want to be able to automate the capture of that time, so we will be using the Kronos vacation module as a template. Employees will be able to request CAFÉ time the same way they request vacation time. We'll be able to track the hours to make sure we measure up to our commitment."

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is also using Kronos to track employees' 20 hours of yearly training. Automated performance management allows the company to better manage employee development plans, from both individual and corporate perspectives. "We truly believe that all of the development plans roll up to the corporate plan and are part of our overall strategy for success," says Brooks. "Being able to automate and then track them is a critical success factor for us."

Automation helps control labor costs

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has been growing an average of 30 percent a year, increasing from 350 to 720 employees over five years. "Before Kronos, we were on the verge of hiring more human resources and payroll staff, but after we implemented Workforce Payroll, we didn't have to increase hiring," says Brooks. Productivity-killing processes have been automated — and this means employees can focus on higher-value work. "With Kronos, people who used to spend hours and hours poring over spreadsheets are now free to focus on other activities," Brooks explains.

Serving up employee empowerment

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is using self-service to give employees and managers access to accurate, complete information across the company's multiple locations and multiple shifts. "We talk a lot about empowerment and how each employee is a person of his or her own destiny," says Brooks. "Self-service really lives it for us. It allows people to feel that they have control with timely, accurate information."

An added benefit? Improved workforce productivity. Now the HR team can devote its resources to higher-level projects rather than getting bogged down in data dissemination. Self-service is also helping GMCR move toward its goal of having a paperless human resources department, an important component of the company's environmental commitment.

"Kronos absolutely supports our strategic goals for the type of company we want to be: pushing the work and the decisions to the most local level possible. We look forward to using the product to support our continued growth."

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