High Quality Information from Kronos Helps Woodbine Entertainment Reduce Labor Costs
Based in Ontario, Canada, Woodbine Entertainment Group is respected throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East as one of the most innovative organizations in racing. The company is one of North America’s oldest and largest sports associations. It is involved in thoroughbred racing, standard-bred racing, slot machine operations, as well as ancillary services such as food and beverage, and The Racing Network, Champions Teletheatre Network, and Horse Player Interactive.
Scheduling and managing personnel in this dynamic environment can be an expensive drain on management. Kelly White, general manager, Food and Beverage Finances, explains that the Food and Beverage Division needed to overcome three distinct challenges — improve complicated scheduling processes, better enforce complex labor policies, and improve control over overtime. Kronos Workforce Central® suite enabled Woodbine Entertainment to successfully address these issues, reducing labor costs and increasing workforce productivity.
Improving scheduling, enforcing policies and controlling overtime
Scheduling for the Food and Beverage division presented a particularly complex challenge. As the company’s most labor-intensive group, it is spread across five properties, with multiple departments, and as many as 800 employees.
The departments in Food and Beverage must also adhere to two collective agreements, each with two subcontracts. While managers and supervisors had all the peripheral information they needed, such as leave balances, work preferences, and collective bargaining agreement details, it existed in different places, making it difficult to efficiently create a schedule that accommodated all these details.
According to White, “We were wasting too much time and resources.” In fact, the scheduling process was taking supervisors and managers off the floor as much as four days per week.
In such a large and dynamic organization, overtime costs also had to be considered in light of profitability and from the perspective of collective bargaining agreements and employee availability. Managers often dealt with overtime after the fact, leading to unnecessary costs.
Kronos offers effective scheduling and integration
After considering seven vendors, Woodbine selected Kronos’ Workforce Central suite to take advantage of the powerful scheduling functionality as well as interfaces with its existing PeopleSoft solutions. “The other scheduling products couldn’t integrate with our systems as well as Kronos,” recalls White. Woodbine also liked the fact that Kronos’ time and labor and scheduling applications came as a single integrated solution.
“Once we saw all the Workforce Central suite could do, we decided to implement it with an aggressive timeframe,” says White. In fact, the Food and Beverage group required Kronos to implement the solution in two months. Kronos leveraged the power of its Workforce Connect™ software, a flexible data integration tool that creates interfaces quickly and reliably to transfer data between systems, such as Workforce Central suite and Woodbine’s PeopleSoft system.
The department also took advantage of customized training programs designed by Kronos’ Educational Services team. “The training experience was fantastic,” White says. “I was able to customize the training with our own operations information, which helped our people learn the system quickly and easily. Many people tell me how easy the system is to use.”
The Workforce Central suite helps improve workforce productivity and reduce labor costs
Now, with the Workforce Central suite, Woodbine managers have a single point of access to manage their entire workforce in real time. The solution automatically tracks employees’ skills and specific requirements such as collective bargaining agreement details, overtime to date, and shift preferences. With this automation comes increased workforce productivity — scheduling has been reduced by as much as 75 percent in many departments, down to a maximum of one day per week for the larger departments. “Now our managers can be on the floor providing the high level of customer service we’re known for,” says White.
Workforce Central suite also helps Woodbine manage and reduce overtime. Because managers can obtain a real-time summary of hours to date, they can find ways to schedule their employees without excessive overtime. The solution is also set up to require approvals on all scheduled overtime. White says, “This has decreased our overtime costs across the board from 15 percent of cost down to two percent of cost.”
In addition to gains in workforce productivity, the department is also using powerful reporting functionality in the Workforce Central suite to gain high quality information. “We can now review regular and overtime hours at the individual unit level,” White explains.
Woodbine’s managers can leverage enhanced functionality to notify them of any critical issues, such as overtime, employee attendance, and leave balances. The system also provides visibility across the enterprise: while each property manages itself individually, White is responsible for food and beverage across the organization. Using Kronos, she can analyze real-time information from any property, review labor costs associated with any department within a property, or view a consolidated report defining performance of Food and Beverage as a whole. “This real-time information was a huge selling point for me,” she says.
According to White, “The most powerful result of the Kronos Workforce Central suite is that the system has allowed us to tighten our labor levels and reduce excess costs, due to its ability to properly track all time-related issues and produce realtime information. Our mandate was to reduce our management labor levels in the scheduling process while strengthening our cost savings in direct labor departments. Kronos’ high-quality information allowed us to reach this goal. We’re excited about the thought of continuing to improve our workforce productivity and decrease labor costs with the Kronos solution.