The "Kronos Guy" Blog

I just returned from the IHRIM show in Washington, D.C.  IHRIM (International Association for Human Resources Information Management) is a long-standing and largely-unknown association for those of us who live at the nexus of Human Resources and Technology.

Remember when you upgraded to 6.x and had to decide what to do with your 4,000 crystal reports? Edward has written a helpful article about the fun we can have when setting up KRONOS to run Crystal Reports via the Business Objects Enterprise server.

It looks like Kronos has actually brought the iSeries product out of the middle ages with it's updated Timekeeper, Activities, Scheduler and Absence Management modules. iSeries, for those of you who've never heard of it, is the big green screen version of Kronos Workforce Central that runs on AS 400's and cool boxes like the IBM i5 server. It also has some Windows client stuff using JWalk and other tools, but basically it feels like you're walking into a 1980's movie. It's usually used in Gaming and Hospitality environments but I've also known hospitals to use it.The fun part though is that they LOVE the old interface. I hear from most clients that they have no interest in anything other than the green screen <g>.

Now it actually was released in September but Kronos tends to under market the product so most people don't know about it. That includes many of the installed base of over 4000 companies including most of Las Vegas!

It's a good read. Check it out.

So as you might imagine, I'm often interested in numbers such as are in this article. Part of my job is creating or validating them. Still, one must ask when presented like this, "Who says there is a 110% ROI and how were those figures calculated?" In my experience ROI is such a soft number that it's really only useful for internal slapping on the back. Not that I doubt the ROI numbers. They're just not useful without detail. Same thing for reducing payroll error by 90%. My first question isn't about the validity of the number it's more, "Why not 100%?". Yea, call me crazy, but I think Payroll should be right, all the time. So scream at me cause you've got 30k employees and how can it be!

What type of best practices do you follow today to make yourself memorable? How many recruiters know and remember you personally? How many hiring managers think of your name when they have a question or better yet - an open position? Do you have to start from scratch every time your contract ends? Or if you are laid off?

Saying that makes me realize this would be a good time to define the various medium that Improvizations uses to communicate to the Kronos and PeopleSoft world.