The "Kronos Guy" Blog

Searching for employees using the wrong genie in Workforce Timekeeper can be a frustrating experience.  All the scrolling up and down to find that specific individual.  It's one of those littly things that can drive you nuts, like traffic, that dumb song you can't get out of your head, or when your pen runs out of ink.  You know what I mean, those little irritations.  Kronos has developed the QuickFind genie to help users who experience this challenge. 

Did you know that some reports are formatted especially for Excel?  By this I mean that they are formatted in rows and columns that can transfer information to a spreadsheet easily.  If you cut and paste Kronos Workforce Central report information into excel with the normal reports, you have to do an awful lot of clean up to make the columns work.

WTF.......

In this last article, we reviewed how Kronos Workforce Central provides the ability to export data to Excel format. Now I am going to give you a good reason to stop! This article will talk about a powerful tool that allows seamless integration between Workforce Central and Microsoft Excel, automating spreadsheets. The tool is called Spreadsheet Server™ and was created by one of our partners, Global Software Inc. to address Excel automation. With it you can integrate or completely transform your reporting environment to Microsoft Excel (the 32-bit version only at this time). It can also be used with any relational database and has built-in support for many popular ERP systems. It can be used to create and distribute dynamic spreadsheets and also has drill-down capabilities.

So we have been talking about Genies because they are great at providing information. This entry will discuss what we can do with our Kronos data after exporting. Customers spend a lot of money implementing and/or upgrading Kronos, so it only makes sense to get as much out of it as possible. So, what else can we do with it? Do we total the data and put it in a spreadsheet? Is it better presented as on a Report, in a Genie, or as a CSV file? What information is going to be beneficial to extract; what’s better to put in an email? What else can we do with Genies?

Most of us have heard the saying "Where do you want to go today?” When authoring Hyperfind™ queries in Kronos Workforce Central™, I envision a revised saying: "What do you want to view tomorrow?"  After designing them, that will allow your Workforce Central managers to get the sweet out of Reports and Genies using HFQs (Hyperfind Queries).

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

If you have ever weeped or gnashed your teeth over the Kronos Transaction Assistant, then perhaps we can assist with at least the weeping part (see your dentist about the gnashing). There are two Kronos database tables that contain all the information that you need to know about errors that are displayed on Transaction assistant. These tables are FAILEDXMLDATA and FAILEDXMLBODY. And here’s a query that will pull all person-level data out:

select distinct a.failedxmldataid "Error ID",c.personnum "Empl ID",

       c.personfullname   "Employee Name",

       c.employmentstatus "Kronos Status",

       convert(char,c.employmentstatusdt,101) "Kronos Status Dt",

       convert(char,c.companyhiredtm,101) "Kronos Hire Dt",

       convert(char,b.updatedtm,120) "Error Dt/Time",b.errorcode "Err Code",

       substring(b.sourcedetails,1,25) "Import Source",

       rtrim(d.fieldname) "Field Name",

       substring(d.internalmesgtxt,charindex('The person',d.internalmesgtxt),190) "Error Message"

from failedxmlbody  a,

     failedxmldata  b,

     vp_employeev42 c,

     importresult   d

where a.failedxmldataid = b.failedxmldataid

  and substring(a.xmlreqbody,charindex('<PersonNumber>',a.xmlreqbody)+14,07)

      = c.personnum

  and charindex('<PersonNumber>',a.xmlreqbody) > 0

  and a.xmlreqkey = 0

  and b.importresultid = d.importresultid

  and b.updatedtm >= '@@Date to Display@@' + ' ' + '**Start Time (hh:mm)**' + ':00'

  and b.updatedtm <= '@@Date to Display@@' + ' ' + '**End Time (hh:mm)**' + ':59.999'

  order by c.personfullname

I like Kronos Workforce Central/ADP eTime. I really do – it’s a good system (though not the only good one out there), and I have many satisfied Kronos customers who share my viewpoint. It can do most anything that’s needed, can interface to most anything that it needs to interface to, derives payroll information accurately, handles exceptions well, and generally meets the business needs of my customers.

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.