Kronos^® Gives Moore & Van Allen's Front Line Instant Online Access to Key Labor Data

 Download Printable Version

Since it was founded more than five decades ago, Moore & Van Allen has been one of the fastest growing law firms in the Southeast. To keep pace with its growth, the company has expanded its workforce to nearly 500 employees spread across three offices in North and South Carolina. During its expansion, Moore & Van Allen has successfully managed its growth and controlled its expenses, enabling it to offer the highest quality counsel for a fair price. The key to its success is a workforce management system from Kronos that captures employee labor data via the web. Kronos has enabled Moore & Van Allen to better manage its legal support staff and streamline manual payroll processes to accurately pay employees and comply with federal regulations and the firm's employee benefit leave policy.

Structured as a collaborative environment, Moore & Van Allen attracts some of the best and brightest minds in the legal industry. The firm specializes in several areas, including bankruptcy, employment, environment, financial services, healthcare, international, litigation, regulatory, legislative, and taxation. To continue offering high-quality counsel in such a broad array of areas at a competitive price, Moore & Van Allen needed to keep costs low by streamlining its expensive and time-consuming manual labor processes.

Using Kronos Workforce Central^® suite, including the Workforce Timekeeper™ application for time and labor, the firm captures employee labor data in real time via the web. The system's Workforce Accruals^® module automatically calculates vacation time in accordance with the firm's unique personal leave policy that debits benefits time from individual employee leave accounts. Workforce Accruals also automatically applies employee-appropriate leave policies to help the firm increase its payroll accuracy to ensure it complies with federal pay regulations. Automated workforce management has eliminated the need for supervisors, human resources, and payroll administrators to track and calculate labor data for each employee. Kronos has enabled Moore & Van Allen to reduce time spent on manual workforce management processes by approximately 50 to 75 percent.

"We evaluated a lot of software packages and only Kronos could handle our personnel leave calculations without manual intervention. We have about 15 different types of pay codes that Workforce Central automatically applies to employee timesheets, enabling us to track employee time for vacation, bereavement, or jury duty without manually going through each employee's paper time sheet," said Patti Oswald, director of human resources and professional recruiting at Moore & Van Allen.

Finding the right fit

Moore & Van Allen uses Kronos' workforce management solutions to capture labor data for both full- and part-time non-exempt employees in its administrative departments, which include legal secretaries, paralegals, word processors, information systems, HR, and accounting personnel. Employees log onto the Kronos system using Workforce Employee™ via the firm's intranet. They enter their employee number and password to access an electronic time sheet where they record their hours. The system automatically calculates overtime and applies appropriate leave rules and pay regulations before forwarding the information to the firm's payroll system for processing.

"Before Kronos, HR spent approximately two days a week tracking down more than 300 employee time sheets using a manual check-off list, then had to double check the calculations and ensure the right amount of personal time was taken to total the employees' weekly scheduled hours," Oswald said. "From there, payroll spent two days every two weeks processing time sheets, including manually recalculating the data and entering it into our payroll system to cut paychecks."

Kronos' streamlined approach to workforce management enables HR personnel to complete weekly payroll in one day for hundreds of administrative employees. Less time spent manually processing payroll gives administrators more time to work on operational and training projects, such as payroll and HR procedure documentation, and supervisory training that might have been overlooked.

"More time means we're better able to take on and manage high-level projects," Oswald said.

Insight into labor activities leads to better workforce management

With online access to Workforce Central, managers can quickly and easily log onto the system to view employee labor data on their PCs. This lets them monitor tardiness or inaccurate timekeeping practices and make informed decisions to change shift schedules or request an employee meeting if necessary.

"Instant online access to Workforce Central has motivated managers to more proactively manage their staff. With the click of the mouse supervisors can tap into their entire staff's schedules, activities, and overtime status to help them better manage employee time," Oswald said. "Supervisors can edit and approve employee time sheets by accessing the Kronos system, eliminating a multi-step process that required them to manually gather, edit, and approve each one. Also, HR personnel no longer need to re-check each time sheet because Kronos ensures accurate accounting and accruals from the start."

Workforce Central generates many different types of reports that enable managers to see schedule information, time and attendance, and hours worked. Access to these reports provides managers with additional insight into their workforce's daily activities on a departmental basis.

"We needed to empower our managers with instant online access to real-time employee labor data to help them better manage their teams to make informed decisions. Workforce Central enables us to more accurately track and manage labor, while providing us with the information we need about our workforce," Oswald said.