Workforce Central Suite® Helps Sunrise Growers Easily Manage Seasonal Employee Influx
When harvest season arrives, employee numbers at Sunrise Growers, Inc. swell by 2,000 seasonal production workers within two weeks. The company, based in Orange County, California, is one of the largest grower-shippers of fresh strawberries in the U.S. and has a growing line of high-quality, fresh vegetables. As a vertically integrated company, Sunrise Growers has its own farming operation, contracts with other growers, sells berries directly, and cools and ships them to distribution centers and grocery store chains. In addition, its sister company, Frozsun Foods, Inc., is the leading processor of frozen strawberries in the country.
After using contract labor agencies for a number of years to hire and manage their seasonal workforce, Sunrise Growers decided to hire production workers directly. With no timekeeping system, a rudimentary HR system, and a payroll system that was not robust enough to handle the surge of seasonal workers, Sunrise Growers sought an integrated solution that could be implemented and operational quickly. This new solution also had to be easy to implement; Sunrise Growers had just seven weeks to get the new system up and running before the next processing season.
The company looked at a number of solutions but didn't find a fully integrated solution until they discovered Kronos. "We were looking for a one-source solution," says Tom Weber, HR director at Sunrise Growers. "In my experience, having multiple vendors often results in a lot of finger pointing. We wanted one company that could fix any problems, so we could focus on our work."
Kronos' integrated Workforce Central suite, including the Workforce Timekeeper™, Workforce HR™, and Workforce Payroll™ applications, has provided Sunrise Growers with exactly what it was searching for.
Detailed labor and product cost information
In addition to an easy-to-use time and attendance, HR, and payroll solution, Sunrise Growers also wanted to capture more detailed labor cost information on the processing of products. "The systems we had in place before weren't detailed enough to identify the labor cost for each plant or each line and each product being run on a different line," Weber explains. "We wanted to be able to really drill down to determine the cost per day and per shift for our production." Part of the labor costing solution also included handheld barcode readers that interfaced with the Kronos products to track movement of employees within the plant. Kronos consultants worked closely with Sunrise personnel and the handheld system provider to create a smooth interface.
With a very compressed processing season, Sunrise Growers' plants must shift quickly from almost no production to full production nearly 24 hours a day, six or seven days a week, with many new and inexperienced supervisory and production workers joining the company each season. Prior to implementing Workforce Central, the company relied on paper recordkeeping to track the many products processed on the production line, which can include three or four products during an eight-hour or 10-hour shift.
This paper-based system made it difficult to gather accurate information on which employees were working and how many were working each shift and on which product lines. At the end of the season, when the company tallied costs to identify the most efficient products and how products should be priced for the marketplace, the information provided only very general information for decision making.
New system enhances visibility and profitability
"Since we implemented the Kronos system, we can much more closely identify where our efficiencies and inefficiencies are for our product lines and the different plants, so we can make better decisions about which products to run in which plants," says Weber.
"Most importantly, we have been able to identify which are profitable and which are unprofitable products, and adjust pricing to our customers so we can stay competitive and profitable," Weber adds. In addition, by implementing the Kronos solution and bringing the hiring process for seasonal workers in-house, the system paid for itself in just seven months.
Identifying workers' compensation costs
The company is also now able to more accurately track workers' compensation costs. Using the Kronos solution's standard report information on the costs of worker injuries by location, plant, and division, Weber says managers are now focused on both the dollar cost and human cost of injuries. Previously, operating managers had little of this information available. Now, with access to this new information, the company can both identify and better control these labor costs and reduce the number of incidences.
Quickly up to speed
Not only is Sunrise Growers' production staff seasonal, but much of the HR staff is seasonal as well, doubling in size during the processing season. With new HR employees joining the company each year, the company needed a system that is easy to train on and also intuitive to use. Even with this new HR staff hiring and training 2,000 production workers in only two weeks, Weber says the Kronos system is easy to use, for both production workers and HR staff conducting training.
As part of the new system, Sunrise Growers installed Kronos 4500 Touch ID™ terminals at the company's production facilities, where buddy punching had been a suspected problem in the past. The new biometrics solution has eliminated costly buddy punching and provides an accurate accounting of the actual hours worked by each employee at each facility. Employees have quickly adjusted to using the new biometrics system.
Efficiencies maintain payroll staffing level
Before taking on the hiring, timekeeping, and payroll processing needs of 2,000 seasonal workers, Sunrise Growers wondered if it would have to expand its two-person payroll staff. With the new Kronos solution in place, the company has been pleased to discover that its current staff can easily handle the increased payroll numbers. "This is one of the real benefits of the Kronos system," says Weber. "We had two people in payroll before we added 2,000 employees and we still have two people in payroll."
Easily customizable system
When Sunrise Growers first implemented Workforce Central, the company had it configured to deliver specific cost information. Following the initial processing season, they wanted a slightly different view of labor costs. "It was not at all complicated for us to make the adjustments in the structure of the data ourselves to get more focused cost information from the system as we ran through the year," notes Weber. "This was one of things that we looked for in a system, one where we wouldn't have to call in consultants to make adjustments in our data. The Kronos system is easily customized to what we're looking for."
As Sunrise Growers looks to the future, the company is planning to roll out the employee and manager self-service modules. They also are looking to upgrade to Workforce Central 5.1, in which all applications are on a single database, and are exploring the advanced scheduling capabilities of Workforce Scheduler™.
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