Kronos® and Passport Enable Mobile Workforce Management
Industry leading organizations use mobile labor tracking to improve productivity and accountability
LAS VEGAS, Nov. 5, 2007 — In today's competitive environment where market forces put pressure on prices, managing labor costs is often the key to an organization's profitability. But you can't manage what you can't measure. When front-line employees are mobile — on the shop floor, in the distribution center, at job sites, or customer locations — tracking labor accurately against products or projects can be a real challenge. Many organizations make do with inefficient paper timesheets or hope that estimated costs are close enough. Over the past three years, leading organizations have implemented integrated mobile workforce management solutions from Kronos® Incorporated and Passport Corporation to track labor at the point of activity, resulting in improved productivity and accountability.
Several organizations are sharing their successful use of mobile workforce management solutions with attendees at KronosWorks™, which is taking place this week in Las Vegas. KronosWorks is the industry's largest venue for exchanging ideas in how to effectively manage the workforce.
Manufacturing: On the shop floor
"We improved our payroll management by implementing Kronos' Workforce Central® suite for time and attendance, but we were still relying on inefficient paper timesheets on the shop floor to track labor costs per production batch," noted Angela Mallory, controller of Helena Industries, a leading contract manufacturer of chemical products. "By integrating Workforce Central with our ERP system and implementing the Passport mobile solution to capture direct and indirect labor details on the spot, we've been able to streamline operations and increase efficiency. Accurately tracking and managing labor costs is critical to our success in a competitive environment. For the first time ever, we can reconcile production hours into product costing and payroll without variances, and have total accountability of labor dollars."
Helena Industries was recently featured in an IndustryWeek webcast entitled, "Mobile Labor Tracking: Capture and Control Labor Information to Drive Efficiency and Accuracy across Operations", available at www.industryweek.com/webcasts.
Building Trades: At job sites
"We wanted to leverage our Kronos workforce management system to accurately track labor against work orders for job costing, billing, and payroll. We also needed a way to efficiently dispatch and manage those work orders between our event management system and our trades people who support facilities across 166 acres," said Jeff Emsley, business analyst at Northlands.
"Passport integrated real-time labor and work order management on PDAs, providing a more efficient workflow for our mobile employees. With more accurate labor tracking, we can use actual costs to set prices and ensure profitability. And by eliminating travel time to pick up printed work orders and not having to manually record and re-key job notes and labor hours, we're allowing our specialized trades people to spend an extra 40 minutes per day on the tasks that matter."
Northlands is one of North America's leading business, exhibition, and entertainment destinations, attracting and producing 2,500 events and hosting four million visitors each year in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Energy: In remote operations
"We wanted timely and accurate labor information from our mining operations to improve efficiency and streamline payroll. But with employees working in remote locations that have no suitable power or connectivity, we needed an easy-to-use mobile solution that could work anywhere," said Gary Kalbfleisch, vice president of information technologies at Peabody Energy. "The integrated Kronos/Passport solution has provided us with the flexibility to handle diverse environments across our multiple locations."
Peabody Energy is the world's largest coal company, fueling more than 10 percent of America's and more than 2 percent of the world's electricity. When Peabody needed a workforce management solution for its 9,300 employees, 50 percent of whom work in remote mining operations, it turned to Kronos and Passport.
Integrated mobile applications
Kronos and Passport offer easy-to-use, flexible, integrated software applications for mobile workforce management. Passport inTime extends Kronos' solution to supervisors or employees "anywhere, anytime" to capture direct and indirect labor hours; specify labor accounts and pay rules for time worked; and review/approve timecards. Passport inTrack integrates with Kronos' solution to track labor and work-in-process on the shop floor or in the field. Passport inService is a suite of complementary mobile solutions to automate work order management, dispatch, inspections, asset tracking, and more. These applications allow users to work productively online or offline, support all types of wireless and wired networks, and run on a wide range of mobile devices including phones, PDAs, rugged handhelds, and laptops
About Passport Corporation
Passport Corporation delivers mobile workforce management solutions that help companies enhance the productivity of front-line employees and the accountability of operations. Using Passport's mobile software applications to track labor and manage jobs at the point of activity, companies gain accurate and timely information to improve costing, billing, payroll, compliance and resource management. Founded in 1990, Passport serves customers in manufacturing, logistics, energy, construction, facilities services and other industries with mobile or remote employees. For more information, visit www.passportcorp.com.
About Kronos Incorporated
Kronos Incorporated empowers organizations around the world to effectively manage their workforce. At Kronos, we are experts who are solely focused on delivering software and services that enable organizations to reduce costs, increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction, and ultimately enhance the level of service they provide. Kronos serves customers in more than 60 countries through its network of offices, subsidiaries, and distributors. Widely recognized as a market and thought leader in managing the workforce, Kronos has unrivaled reach with more than 30 million people using a Kronos solution every day. Learn more about Kronos at www.kronos.com.
