Tried and True: Wyndham Worldwide Keeps With Kronos^® As It Branches Out On Its Own

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Wyndham Worldwide, one of the world's largest hospitality companies, looked to the past to plan its future when it spun off from Cendant Corporation over two years ago.

After analyzing the needs of its employee base — Wyndham Worldwide has thousands of locations in hotels, rental properties, and timeshare resorts across six continents — and considering future expansion plans, the company made the decision to choose Kronos^® for its workforce management solution. How did it get there? Other companies were investigated. Internal business units weighed in. And in the end, it came down to experience. Wyndham Worldwide decided to stick with Kronos, the solution it had been using successfully under the Cendant umbrella.

"Cendant businesses had been Kronos customers for over 20 years. Based on that long-term relationship and satisfaction with the products, Wyndham Worldwide chose Kronos for our workforce management needs," said Paul Amore, director, Wyndham Worldwide HRMS.

Technology and training: a win-win situation

Leveraging the existing investment in both Kronos terminals and in employee training were also heavily weighted factors in the decision to continue with Kronos. Wyndham Worldwide currently has 266 active Kronos 4500™ terminals and has plans to increase that number by more than 30 percent to 348. Older model Kronos terminals are also being replaced with newer model 4500 terminals.

With the diversities of employee populations within its organization — across departments and locations — another benefit that helped Wyndham Worldwide select Kronos was that the solution facilitated the set-up of various, and multiple, time-capture methods specific to a particular location's needs. "One of the main reasons we stayed with Kronos in the post-Cendant era was thinking of our hourly employees. We wanted the least pain for them. They do a good job at the terminals and the terminals are dependable — we had very little transition pains," Amore said.

Success with approvals and accruals lead to new additions

In its new implementation of Kronos, approximately 16,000 hourly employees in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands are currently using Wyndham Worldwide's Kronos system. Looking to improve payroll accuracy and reduce excessive overtime, the company focused on both employee and manager approvals as ways to increase cost effectiveness.

With Workforce Timekeeper™, there are now two levels of approvals, helping to deliver pay accurately and control labor costs. "We have engaged in a companywide compliancy effort to increase our percentages of employee approvals and management approvals prior to processing signoff and sending our payroll files to our payroll provider," explained Amore. Through Kronos automated self-service, first employees approve their timecards and then their respective managers do the same. "Since our Kronos implementation over two years ago, we have seen increased percentages of all levels of approval with our managers and Kronos administrators. They are using Workforce Genies^®, Kronos reports, and custom approval reports to monitor and pursue timecard approvals. We now have some locations at 100 percent approvals with other percentages continually going up," he continued.

With thousands of employees spread over 200 locations, keeping track of time worked wasn't the only issue of concern for employees and managers alike. The administration of paid time off in compliance with company policy also needed to be addressed. Wyndham Worldwide chose Workforce Accruals^®, Kronos flexible accrual management application, to automate policies associated with the granting, validation, and calculation of paid time off. "Everyone is concerned about the accruing and management of paid time off, from when they enter it into a timecard to what's left in the balance," said Amore. "Kronos manages our accruals very well. We have some complex accrual requirements and the Workforce Accruals module has definitely satisfied our needs."

Both time and money have been saved with the all-around increase in accuracy surrounding the time and labor practices at Wyndham Worldwide. "With ever-improving approval statistics, we have reduced manual time-consuming efforts of timecard edits; reduced the number of payroll adjustments; increased the accuracy of accrual tracking — especially for our exempt population; reduced unapproved overtime; greatly reduced regular and overtime overpayment resulting from inaccuracies in timecards; and increased the efficiency of our business unit Kronos administrators and payroll departments," concluded Amore.

And now, after attending a session on Workforce Leave™ at KronosWorks™, the annual global Kronos customer conference, Wyndham Worldwide is contemplating adding this key component of Kronos total absence management solution to its organization. Workforce Leave will allow Wyndham Worldwide to streamline the entire leave management process, from eligibility to entitlement to on-leave compensation, and help maintain compliance with FMLA and other labor law mandates.

Report generation, available on demand

Timing and availability of the system for tracking time is extremely important, but being able to pull out information for analysis is equally important to both real time and strategic actions.

As Wyndham Worldwide established its new systems, Kronos Professional Services was engaged to help work through hardware upgrades that would enhance its reporting capabilities and provide more reporting flexibility. Now, after taking the advice of KPS and implementing new architecture, custom reports, and delivered reports, can be run any day at any time, even on payroll sign-off days. "We wanted a trustworthy, steady system that would stay online. We wanted a system with which we could do reporting anytime during the day," said Amore. "Our Kronos solution has given users the ability to do reporting at any given time for any given reporting output, small or large."

Upgrade and expand: The future looks bright

In addition to upgrading all of its terminals, Wyndham Worldwide is also planning to upgrade to the latest version of Workforce Timekeeper, but that's just the beginning of the partnership between Kronos and this hospitality powerhouse.

While visiting KronosWorks, Wyndham Worldwide leaders explored how other companies were using Kronos language capabilities to expand their solutions into different countries. "We are definitely going to be rolling out to Latin America. Knowing that Kronos has the Spanish-language option available was a huge plus for us," said Amore. The company's future plans involve the deployment of its Kronos system to locations in Mexico, Uruguay, Ireland, and Australia.

When establishing its own systems, Wyndham Worldwide looked to its previous successes to choose the right partner for its workforce management needs. Now with an eye toward the future, Wyndham Worldwide continues to include Kronos in its plans, a nod to the real-time successes the Kronos solution brings.