What is Kronos WFC "employee self-service" (ESS) about?

It's about allowing the majority of the employee population that use Kronos Workforce Central (WFC) to communicate more proactively and save your manager(s) AND organization time. Other departments where the cost savings by ESS are appreciated may include HR & Payroll. After all, the old saying goes: "Time is Money".

One of the best things about working for new clients is seeing how they employ essentially the same Kronos software differently to solve very similar, if not identical, business problems.  Over the years this has given our technical specialists a variety of different perspectives—not just on how to get the configuration to work in certain situations but also what it can be like to maintain and change these structures over time.

In the first episode of this blog on rationalizing policies and practices across wholly owned but separate entities I touched on the most common grist of size and function with the example of a big oil company running a small lemonade stand.  Freshly squeezed from a client in a completely different industry I can tell you that, while the particular issues change, the themes are universal.  Therefore, in this second part of my blog, I would like to categorize the common types of wrinkles we are called to iron out either before or during a large Kronos Workforce Management / Payroll project.  In Part III I’ll even share some of the best practice ways we have seen them addressed using Kronos Timekeeper and, of course, share some of the less-than-brilliant approaches.

Years ago when SOX404 standards became mandatory for public companies it was a common statement from IT, Finance and other managers—“Shouldn’t we be doing most of this stuff anyway?”   Sure the cost of moving from where we were to a more transparent, 404 compliant infrastructures was initially high but