The "Kronos Guy" Blog

This last article outlined how effective dates impacted the employee record for Timekeeper items. In this article I will discuss how the Workforce Central (WFC) system handles effective dates for those components that apply to a Workforce Scheduler (WFS) licensed employee.  First, let’s start with a scenario: 

Kronos WFC v6.1 introduced the concept of "Cascading Pay Codes." And actually the logic of cascading pay codes was introduced a few versions back as a part of the Leave module -- the idea had so many possibilities that Kronos incorporated it into the main module of WTK.

When you are building a schedule for an employee, it is often common that an employee will do multiple things during that period of time while they are working. For example (using hospital schedules), a nurse may spend the morning precepting another employee and the afternoon floating to another unit. Both of those are schedule transfers.

The introduction of schedules and the org map into Kronos Workforce Central Timekeeper provides an area of opportunity for your time transfers to be handle in a whole new way. (And you all read the previous blog entry on WHY you should do all transfers via the org map with schedules, especially in Kronos Healthcare, right?!)

Everyone is familiar with labor levels in Kronos. You have up to seven that you can assign and use to make up your employee's "home labor account." The general practice is align your labor levels with your financial systems - GL and Payroll - so that your employee's time worked is charged appropriately. Of course no one has seven levels that they actually use for charging and transferring time, so the rest of the labor levels are used for reporting or some reason that no one remembers...! The only really important labor levels that get transferred around are Company/Facility, Cost Center/Department, Position, and sometimes a project code (although this one is mostly for reporting). Does this sound familiar?

As a review, let's briefly recall where our Quest has taken us so far. Remember that our Grail is WFM (workforce management) system harmony for healthcare organizations. We have dreamed what our system would like in a perfect world... and we know that it doesn't exist. But we also know that a Schedule-Centric approach to Kronos Workforce Central lets us start with staff schedules and utilize the features of the Schedule Planner to funnel data into a single point of entry.

What is the most immediately noticeable feature of a harmonious implementation of Kronos WFC in healthcare?A single point of entry for employee transactional data.

When you think of the word "harmony", what comes to your mind? Maybe a peaceful nature scene or an orchestra performing a symphony... Or maybe some synonyms float up from your subconscious: peace, balance, accord, synchronicity. Odds are, the one thing you did NOT think of was a collection of software applications. Software applications by their very nature are distinct and separate from each other, right? Even Microsoft, with every new release of Office, brings a consistent look & feel and offers some features that provide interactivity within the MS Office suite, but you still think of Word and Excel as separate applications, not anything that relates to the word "harmony"...

Kronos Workforce Central is a suite of applications too. You start with Timekeeper, because that's the core module. Then you can add in other modules like Accruals and Scheduler and Leave and Attendance and Record Manager and Device Manager (formerly DCM) and so on. And some of those modules are more integrated than others - Accruals, for example, is about as tightly integrated with Timekeeper as you could imagine, while Leave could almost be completely stripped out to form a standalone document-tracking application. Much like the MS Office suite, no one is thinking about "harmony."

For healthcare organizations, one of the "Holy Grails" of software is a staff scheduling application that puts scheduling tools in the hands of their managers while simultaneously providing their leadership with labor productivity data to manage costs. This is a noble goal-and an achievable one-but not many Kronos healthcare customers seem to have put their hands on it yet. Have you?