Kronos^® Helps Unifi Weave a Powerful Solution for Payroll and Time and Labor

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Unifi, Inc., headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, is one of the world's largest producers of textured yarns. Their products are among the industry's highest quality and most innovative, and are used in a wide range of markets — from automotive to industrial manufacturing, home furnishings to upholstery, clothing and apparel to sewing thread. To meet its objective of becoming the supplier of choice in every major textile and apparel region in the world, Unifi continues to grow the capability of its organization at an impressive rate, currently operating five sales offices globally and state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in North America, Latin America, and China.

"Six years ago, all of our processes for human resources, payroll, and time and labor were manual with no possibility for obtaining business metrics," recalls Ben Holder, chief information officer at Unifi. "It was very clear then that tallying data in an offline system and having individually maintained silos of information would not support our growth strategy."

At the time, Unifi chose Kronos to help them automate time and labor. The company decided that outsourcing payroll to another vendor made the most sense for their business, as a means to simplify their IT environment and save money. Unifi retained their Kronos data collection devices, but relied on the outsourcing vendor to process all their human resources and payroll data - or so they thought. A recent analysis of their investment forced Unifi to question the return on investment in outsourcing their payroll processes.

The inside story

For Unifi, the main incentive to returning their payroll processes in house was cost. "Despite our objectives with outsourcing, we were expending a great deal of time and effort to deliver our payroll vendor a pristine data file," explains Holder. "Essentially, we were paying them to cut checks. While we were happy with the vendor's service, returning our payroll processes in house became strictly a business decision."

To accomplish that, Unifi needed an integrated suite of applications. At the same time, they desperately wanted to reduce their IT portfolio to a few key software suppliers. Holder liked the options Kronos' solution set offered them, and was very pleased with how Kronos' Workforce Central^® suite was evolving.

"We already had a very strong comfort level with Kronos as a vendor," explains Holder, "and we liked the fact that Kronos offers a total solution, but that we weren't forced to select those parts of the solution we didn't need. The Workforce Central suite allowed us to choose a la carte the products that meet our current business needs. From an IT perspective, we made the decision to align with financially stable market leaders with strong track records and significant footprints in their space, so that we could trust them to be around tomorrow. Kronos was a natural fit."

Given these criteria, Holder's team chose Kronos' Workforce Timekeeper™ for their time and labor needs and Oracle 11i for human resources and payroll. Unifi also upgraded their data collection devices to Kronos 4500™ terminals. "The key to our decision was the realization that, by returning our payroll processes in house, we could recoup the cost of our investment in Oracle and Kronos in just 11 months. It was a clear and convincing return on investment."

Kronos provides a pattern for success

According to Holder, Kronos' solutions were essential to helping his team achieve a simplified, cost-effective environment. "The centralized deployment and maintenance of the Workforce Central suite epitomizes the kind of architecture we want to have," says Holder. "It also fit extremely well with our strategy to use the web as a platform of choice."

There are currently over 3,000 Unifi employees using Workforce Timekeeper. Kronos' data collection terminals are used to collect labor data at 18 sites, including locations as far away as Ireland. Before Workforce Timekeeper, each of these sites maintained their own data store. The information had to be collected by Unifi's corporate office, consolidated into one spreadsheet, and validated before it was sent to the payroll vendor. Now with a single source for labor data, Unifi has achieved significant time and cost savings, and has much more confidence in the integrity of the data being collected.

"It was difficult at first to break down individual site ownership of the data," explains Holder. "But over time the benefits became clear to everyone. Collecting labor data became a non-event for both the employees and the IT staff, and the centralized database eliminated the headaches of managing so many individual silos of information." As a result of implementing Workforce Timekeeper, Holder's team was able to further their objective of establishing the web as a channel for IT delivery. They were also able to consolidate their IT environment, eliminating 10 servers.

Holder also points to an essential yet unexpected benefit of Kronos' system. "We had been struggling to implement a disaster recovery solution for human resources and payroll processing. By consolidating all of our data into a centralized database, we found that Kronos had indirectly solved that challenge for us."

A seamless solution is a perfect fit

Besides the strength of the applications, Holder cites two key elements to their success with Kronos: ease of implementation and ease of use.

"We expected the integration of Workforce Timekeeper and Oracle to have its challenges. But thanks to the Workforce Connect™ integration tool, it was very straightforward from a technical perspective, and by far one of the easiest and most seamless implementations I've ever experienced. The two systems share data without any human intervention, and the process is completely invisible to the user group."

Holder also credits Kronos' professional services for helping make the implementation an easy one. "They were key to the success of the overall project, providing assistance during critical stages and making sure we had the knowledge to continue that success following the implementation. Kronos also helped us educate our employees with a "train the trainer" approach. This helped us create an internal knowledge base that ensures our managers and employees are comfortable with the system. Our employees found Kronos' training to be intuitive and easy to understand."

Kronos helps tie it all together

Features, deployment, and services: Kronos combined all three, says Holder, into a winning strategy for Unifi. Workforce Timekeeper was easy to integrate into their environment, from both a technical and people perspective, because the web-based architecture makes it easy to deploy to users, and even easier for the IT staff to maintain.

"The technical project manager for our Kronos project tells me that Workforce Timekeeper is the best-written application he's ever seen. I can tell you that there were virtually no training issues; our employees transitioned quickly and easily. And our business managers can tell you that Kronos has had a significant impact on our productivity and bottom line. It was an easy decision that went beyond just saving the money we were spending to outsource our payroll."