The "Kronos Guy" Blog

When you look at medical or life insurance policies there are generally two layers to them. There is the big concept, large-type section and, of course, the infamous minute detail, small-print section where the gnashing of arcane points is explicitly called out with mathematical precision. Written Pay & Leave Policies in most companies are the same with the big ideas called out in the HR/PR Policy docs and the hair-splitting details called out in…well? Where are all those pay precedence, rounding precision, cascade sequence, over limit, allow less than zero policies documented?  In most companies you actually have to look at the configuration code – Payrules, Workrules, Paycodes, Leave Cascades, etc to know what will really happen when various work and leave hours are run thru the mill. Is this best practice?     

I am always surprised when long time users of Kronos’ Workforce Timekeeper seem to have forgotten about the ability to perform group edits.

I recently had the opportunity to work with a client that implemented a new HRPR system. Along with infrastructure changes they also had an interesting structural change that restructured all positions in their existing Kronos system. Those changes needed to be reflected in Kronos Workforce Timekeeper and Scheduler. They needed to expand the existing organizational hierarchy to allow for an additional level at the top of the structure and expand existing levels to allow for more characters. Post the change, scheduling and labor accounting can now be done with the added level. In addition, since there are more digits for level entries, it reduced the amount of level entries to go through for a transfer or employee assignment.

The Greek titan of time, “Kronos” (or Cronus) in addition to spawning the name of the company we all know and love, also had many children. Most of these he ate. Or at least swallowed until, Zeus, one of the survivors grew up and forced Kronos to disgorge his siblings.  Such abuse was apparently common during the so called Golden Age of Greek mythology.  Another famous Greek, Plato, is known for his own perspective on the abuse of things… namely poets and or poetry. Apparently much nerdier folks than I have spilled a lot of ink debating whether Plato disliked poetry or the poets themselves.  As far as I have read he never ate any of them.  Plato did, however, coin a very interesting (dare I say poetic) admonition: “Banish the abuse, not the thing”. 

WTF.......

What was my password again????????

        I just love Holidays.

Automating Holidays in Kronos Workforce Central is a wonderful time saving feature that has changed a lot over past versions.  In fact, it is really a collection of features.   Recently, I visited a client who was still manually calculating their holidays.  They would perform a group edit and assign Holiday hours (HOL) to all their employees.  Then they would review the employees' timecards and remove the holiday credit from each employee who did not qualify for Holiday pay because they were part time, new, or did not work the correct days.  Lucky for the client, the company rules were such that simply being paid REG along with receiving the Holiday bonus was sufficient pay for working on the holiday.

One of my “am I really the only one who sees this problem?” complaints is about the lack of cream at coffee houses.  You can find various kinds of flavorings, ‘creamers’ and ‘whiteners’ but the state of the art at most places seems to be milk or, at best, half-and-half.  I’m actually more upset about vendors considering any white substance cream and customers accepting it. (I recently had a 10 minute discussion with a barista about their lack of cream while she stared at me quizzically with a carton of half-and-half in her hand saying “But I just refilled the creamer!?!?”).  We both walked away scratching our heads.

For those following the Kronos New Feature Series, this will be the last article in the series – THE END! However, comment posting will still be available for the entire series. We talked about new features available to customers upgrading to the most current version of Kronos Workforce Timekeeper. The prior articles covered why an organization might use some of the new Workforce Central (WFC) features and why they should consider upgrading. Simply speaking, what’s in it for us? What is this talk about an “Upgrade Studio”? So let's wipe the dust off that old Kronos version and weigh if the change is worthwhile.

Here are a few quick answers to the most common questions we get about recording vacation time (PTO) in WFC.