Kronos Workforce Central is the Best-in-Class Solution for Lancaster School District

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Lancaster School District is located 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the high desert and serves more than 15,000 students from preschool through eighth grade. The district has been serving what is known as the Antelope Valley since 1885 with five middle schools, 12 elementary schools, one alternative education facility, and a preschool program serving more than 500 students.

Before choosing the Kronos Workforce Central^® suite to manage its workforce, Lancaster School District used a manual, paper-driven system to track time and attendance, accruals, and other critical employee data. With 1,000 certificated employees, 900 classified employees, and 50 unclassified employees working multiple jobs at different pay rates, tracking employee data manually proved to be costly, time-consuming, and inefficient for a small payroll department. Heather Cowan, payroll specialist at Lancaster School District, explains the overwhelming task of processing payroll with hundreds of paper timesheets. “The sheer number of timesheets was the biggest problem,” Cowan says. “It was a huge undertaking to get payroll done every two weeks. The payroll department had not grown in size for 25 years, despite the fact that we had tripled the number of employees within the school system.”

The massive number of timesheets that payroll had to process was not the only issue Lancaster School District had to face. Inaccurate timesheets, excess overtime, and tracking different employee pay rates with a manually driven time and attendance solution was costing Lancaster School District money and productivity while it faced tight budget constraints. Lancaster School District chose to address these issues by purchasing Kronos Workforce Central in 2003. Today Lancaster School District manages its workforce with a solution that includes the Workforce Timekeeper™, Workforce Employee™, Workforce Accruals™, Workforce Manager™, and Workforce Connect™.

Workforce Central helps save time, money, and productivity

Lancaster School District now relies on Workforce Central’s ability to automatically track time and attendance, accruals, overtime, and other employee data. This has proved to provide huge savings in time, money, and resources for the school district. The ability of the Kronos solution to track different pay codes of employees working more than one position in the school district has proven to be a major benefit. Not only are the employees paid correctly for each job they perform, but the solution also helps the school district determine how to properly budget funds across all areas as directed by the county.

Automated tracking of pay codes has eliminated the practice of employees filling out multiple timesheets for different jobs. The practice of payroll manually entering these multiple timesheets each pay period has also been eliminated saving time and productivity while reducing costly errors. “Our Kronos solution is fabulous,” Cowan says. “It has been a huge time saver for both our payroll department and the employees. We would need to at least double our staff in payroll with a manual timekeeping system. We can now make sure that our employees are paid correctly and our budgets are accurate. These are critical factors in difficult economic times.” Cowan mentions that Workforce Central has saved thousands of dollars in payroll costs for the school district in each of the last four years.

Lancaster School District has also found that automatically tracking overtime with Workforce Central is crucial with a tight budget. “We can reduce overtime because administrators must approve it before we pay it,” Cowan says. Under its manual time and attendance system, Lancaster School District would round overtime pay up to the nearest 15 minutes. With Workforce Central, overtime is calculated to the minute saving more money for the school district. Overtime must be allocated judiciously during this economic climate, and Workforce Central has allowed Lancaster School District to do just that.

Extensive reporting options help Lancaster monitor compliance and obtain grants

With a significant number of union employees, it is crucial that Lancaster School District have access to detailed employee data to maintain compliance with union contracts. The extensive reporting capabilities of Workforce Central help the school district obtain the proper information needed to enforce union contract provisions. “The electronic audit trail is a fantastic feature,” Cowan says. “We can see when and where an employee signed in, if and when an employee makes changes, and if the employee is currently on campus.” With this information available in real time, union employee grievances can be resolved in a timely manner.  For safety purposes in case of an emergency, supervisors can also use Workforce Central to identify which employees are in the building.

Lancaster School District has also used the reporting capabilities of Workforce Central to manage grants. This helps the school district account for the grants it is receiving.  Because labor is assigned to grant projects, it is imperative that the school district be highly transparent and accountable to both the county and the granting organizations. “With the help of reports provided by Workforce Central, we are able to emphatically show the amounts of time, effort, and resources that are being put toward grant funds,” Cowan explains. “As a result, our attention to these detailed reports helps put us in a stronger position to qualify for future grants.”

Lancaster looks to a future of growth with Workforce Central

Switching from a paper-driven workforce management system to Workforce Central has helped Lancaster School District eliminate a significant amount of costly, time-consuming processes.  The school district looks to continue its mutually beneficial relationship with Kronos by upgrading to Version 6.0 of the Workforce Central suite. “There are so many ways in which the Kronos solution has improved our lives that we have recommended it to other school districts,” Cowan says. “We could not operate this efficiently without our Kronos solution.” Because of its ability to streamline and automatically track employee data, Workforce Central has helped Lancaster School District continue to grow in these difficult economic times. Recently the district added 30 new employees to its preschool program. “With our Kronos solution in place, adding these employees was a simple, streamlined, and cost-effective procedure. Workforce Central will help make our district’s growth much easier in the future,” Cowan notes.