DeKalb County Improves Time and Labor Processes with the Workforce Central® Suite
As one of five major counties in the Atlanta area, DeKalb County, Georgia has more than 7,000 employees in 185 different locations and serves a population of 676,000 residents. Its employees work in the areas of police services, the sheriff's department, fire and EMS, water and sewer, sanitation, roads and drainage, courts, administration, and more.
With such a wide array of employee groups, DeKalb County faced many different challenges related to its overall payroll process. At the heart of the problem: Multiple methods for capturing time-related data, and interfacing all of this information with its time and labor system.
The county found exactly what it was looking for with Kronos' Workforce Timekeeper™ solution (an integral component within the Workforce Central® suite). Implementing this powerful time and labor solution helped DeKalb County automate critical payroll processes and achieve some significant benefits along the way, including improved efficiency, increased productivity, and decreased costs.
Room for improvement
Considering where DeKalb started, these results are even more impressive. Richard Gray, DeKalb's IS project manager, remembers life before Kronos. "Employees in our fire and sheriff's department and police services used to fill out paper timecards to submit their time and attendance information," he says. "Their supervisors had to collect, review, and approve them, and then they had to key all of this information into our payroll system."
At the same time, DeKalb faced a number of other challenges. "We had a lot of the same problems other local governments have, such as 43 different pay and work rules and a 28-day overtime payroll cycle for our fire and sheriff's department," Gray explains. "In addition, we were so decentralized that it was hard to manage the entire process." He cites an example where the sanitation department had a complex pay policy where they were paid for a fifth day if they worked the four other days. "Before Kronos, we had a hard time administering this policy consistently. Workforce Timekeeper was flexible enough to accommodate all of our different processes and pay rules."
There were additional challenges too. "We even had the case where our fire chiefs were driving around the entire county on the Friday before payroll collecting timecards," remembers Donna Stone, lead programmer analyst for DeKalb County. "As you can imagine, this wasn't the best use of their time."
Implementing an automated time and labor solution
To address these issues, DeKalb turned to Kronos for help. The county had already implemented Kronos' Timekeeper Central® solution for a select number of departments more than 15 years ago, and it was fully committed to Kronos as its technology partner. So when Kronos launched its Web-based Workforce Central suite, DeKalb decided to upgrade.
DeKalb County was up and running — with all employees live on the Workforce Central suite — in under nine months. This is an impressive installation time considering the implementation size and scope and the fact that DeKalb had a team of just two people dedicated to the process.
Stone credits their Kronos consultant for their implementation success. "We worked closely with him to get all employees on the system — one group at a time — and test everything carefully before moving on," she says. Once all the employee data was on the test system, DeKalb grouped similar departments into phases, ran parallel payrolls for one or two pay periods, and "flipped the switch" to go live.
DeKalb also completed extensive training. "It all went exceptionally well," comments Stone. "We used Kronos training programs for our key users and IT staff, but we chose to train most users internally. That way we could use our own data to make the experience much more relevant." Nearly 600 employees were trained in the process.
The Workforce Central suite produces better results
Now, with Workforce Timekeeper firmly in place, DeKalb County is beginning to see many significant benefits.
This powerful solution enabled DeKalb County to automate semi-manual systems and improve its overall payroll process. "Now, instead of filling out paper timecards, half of the employees just swipe an ID badge through a Kronos data collection terminal," Stone explains. Other employees are paid based on their scheduled hours, or they submit this information using Workforce Employee™, a browser-based interface that enables them to enter time and labor information.
"Their data is collected immediately and stored in a central database," says Stone. As a result, the county saved a lot of time and increased employee productivity at the same time. "We managed to save half a day on payroll," states Gray. "Before Kronos, it seemed like information was always late, and there were too many corrections. As a result, it was a struggle to get payroll ready in time to produce the employees' checks," Gray recalls. "Now, with Workforce Timekeeper, once we have all the information, it only takes 30 minutes before we are ready to run payroll."
As a result, the process has become much easier and data is more accurate. "Our payroll professionals only have to review the information now instead of making last-minute changes or entering data," says Stone, noting that this has freed them to spend time on more strategic objectives. "In our police department alone, we used to have 10 payroll people keying and managing 1,800 employees' time entry. Now they're able to spend more time focused on other tasks."
Other benefits
With better access to critical data and more time to review it, the county has found that its data is much more accurate — and that has led to other benefits. "We have reduced the amount of manual checks we used to write, which has resulted in real cost savings," says Stone. "And because employees' paychecks accurately reflect their time worked, their confidence in the system has gone up too."
Stone gives another example of how Kronos helped the county improve its bottom line. "Workforce Timekeeper helped us notice a discrepancy in the way some of our employees were filling out overtime on their timesheets," she states. "As a result, we were able to identify a lot of 15-minute increments that weren't really overtime; this helped us save a significant amount of money." DeKalb had been looking for a solution that would increase its insight into overtime, and the Workforce Central suite delivered the tools it needed to monitor labor costs in real time.
The road ahead
As DeKalb County continues to use the Workforce Central suite to its full advantage, it has one eye fixed on the future. "We'd like to implement other Kronos solutions," says Gray. "Specifically, we're interested in Workforce Accruals® to help us improve the way we manage employee leave time as well as other solutions for helping us comply with FMLA and other government regulations."
"Workforce Timekeeper has given us a very effective time and labor solution for a diverse group of employees," Stone concludes. "As a result, we have increased overall productivity, empowered employees with more control over their information, and reduced costs in the process. Kronos helped us achieve these goals and more."
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