WestJet Reaches New Heights in Workforce Productivity with the Workforce Central® Suite
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With 7,800 employees and revenues of nearly $2.3 billion, Canada’s most successful low-cost airline, WestJet, has experienced explosive growth since its founding in 1996.
Fast growth often leads to challenges. In WestJet’s case, a manual time and attendance system led to an inability to access necessary data, difficulties in managing leave liability, and error-prone financial reporting.
To reduce labor costs, minimize compliance risks, and improve workplace productivity and engagement, WestJet adopted the Kronos® Workforce Timekeeper™ time and attendance and Workforce Accruals® leave management applications, which are core components within the web-based Workforce Central® suite.
A manual effort breaks down
Tom Arkus, WestJet’s manager of time management, remembers the challenges. “Before Kronos, paychecks were often inaccurate, leading to employee complaints. Managers couldn’t access the data they needed to manage their employees’ overtime, leave, and accruals, because our employees submitted time and attendance information using paper timecards.”
Arkus also reports that it was hard to accurately apply different pay rules across the organization and was difficult to track employees’ leave balances. Finance had to guess at leave liability, since leave data was largely unavailable and often incorrectly calculated. Worse, managers tended to receive critical information — such as overtime totals — when it was too late to prevent unnecessary overtime.
The Kronos Workforce Central suite provided a single solution for these time and labor challenges.
Minimizing compliance risk and reducing labor costs
“We have three very different types of work schedules,” Arkus says. “Workforce Timekeeper automatically applies all of our pay rules — no matter how complex — to employees’ time and attendance data. We’ve gained visibility into where and how labor costs are incurred.” Previously, labor cost accounting was an inaccurate, manual process. To make matters worse, employees frequently fill in for different departments and their labor is accounted for using different cost structures. WestJet was unable to apply these rules accurately and consistently.
In addition, WestJet had two time and attendance systems feeding into its payroll systems and was unable to validate this data. Not only were employees paid incorrectly, finance would report the labor spend incorrectly. As a result, employee paychecks would need to be rerun and changes had to be made to the general ledger. Workforce Central creates a single data stream and validates all data before feeding it into payroll, eliminating rework for payroll and finance.
Using Kronos to automatically apply payroll rules and validate data, the airline can support enormous growth without adding administrative staff. Says Arkus, “When we had 300 employees, we had two payroll coordinators. Now we have the same number of payroll coordinators for 7,500 employees.”
Automated timekeeping has also reduced overtime costs. Whereas managers were once unable to determine whether employees were entitled to overtime, until after the averaging period was complete, managers can now track workers’ pay rates in real time so they can adjust employee schedules to minimize unnecessary overtime.
Improving leave liability management
Workforce Accruals enables WestJet to manage its employee leave and control leave liability. Instead of tracking employees’ leave balances manually, WestJet uses Workforce Accruals to automate the process and improve the way it tracks employee entitlements, total time taken, and outstanding balances.
This powerful application helped WestJet manage a policy that allows employees to take vacation time before it is accrued, as well as track and manage Canada’s statutory holidays. Workforce Accruals has also helped WestJet easily produce reports needed to comply with the Canadian labor code.
Finance can access this data to gain visibility into leave and accrual balances, which are a liability for the airline, across all employees at any time, improving financial risk management.
Providing self-service access to employees and managers
Self-service capabilities, available in Canada’s two official languages, English and French, have enabled the airline to give employees and managers access to time and attendance information.
“Employee self-service capabilities have helped us support our culture of employee satisfaction,” says Arkus. Employees can enter their own time and attendance information and view their own labor information, such as overtime status, statutory holiday calculations, and vacation balances. This has reduced calls to the HR and payroll department from employees looking for basic accrual information.
Managers benefit from the ability to create reports from Kronos data. “For example,” says Arkus, “managers can run reports on accruals for their teams or on the hours people from other departments worked in their departments, which impacts their budgets. That’s a huge win. Previously, managers could never create reports from the time and attendance system.”
Improved visibility into labor costs
Finally, Kronos allows WestJet to pull time and attendance data out of legacy scheduling systems, consolidate this data, and export it into a single feed to payroll. This gives managers formerly unavailable visibility into the costs associated with each schedule and provides data about productivity for each worker and each shift.
Growing with Kronos
WestJet continues to add to its Kronos solutions. The airline is particularly interested in the new mobile capabilities from Kronos. “As we are an airline, many of our managers work on the line rather than at a desk. This will allow us to provid information to their mobile phones in real time,” Arkus says.
Overall, Arkus is thrilled the company’s their progress. “The Workforce Central suite has given us much more than a time and attendance system,” he states. “It has enabled us to better manage our workforce, which means we can be more productive — and more competitive.” WestJet Tom Arkus, Manager of Time Management “When we had 300 employees, we had two payroll coordinators. Now we have the same number of payroll coordinators for 7,800 employees.”
Project benefits
Using the Kronos Workforce Central suite, WestJet has achieved these benefits:
- Enforces labor rules, improves payroll accuracy, and reduces labor costs
- Automates tracking of accruals and leave liability and helps compliancewith Canadian labor laws.
- Enhances employee engagement and gives managers access to the accrual data they need through self-service capabilities
WestJet
Category: Transportation
Business Type: Airline
Employees: 7,800
Products: Workforce Timekeeper, Workforce Accruals
©2010, Kronos Incorporated. Kronos, the Kronos logo, Workforce Central, and Workforce Accruals are registered trademarks and Workforce Timekeeper is a trademark 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.
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