The "Kronos Guy" Blog

Skills and certifications are a useful Kronos feature that allows organizations to schedule employees more effectively.  By using skills and certification, a business can better serve its customers or a hospital can ensure that departments have nurses with specific certifications. Let’s start by defining skills and certifications, and then talk about where Kronos stores this information, and finally, how it is used.

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: 

When scheduling in Kronos, it’s good to keep some things in mind.  Now, this isn't an entry on different tools for scheduling in Workforce Timekeeper, that's already been done.  What you will be reading here is just simple tips to help ensure your scheduling experience is a good one.  The first and most obvious:

We have been trying to get some specific help out there for the healthcare industry.  Scheduling in a healthcare environment can be challenging.  First, you are scheduling for a 24 hour facility.  Next, nurses can work anywhere from eight to 16 to 24 hour shifts, and sometimes longer!  Next, there are specific skills an certifications that must be accounted for.  Finally, you must account for the policies inherent in a union environment.  That's a lot of variables we have to plan for in Workforce. Here are a few features in the basic scheduling application in Workforce Timekeeper that may help out. 

Scheduling is an important job within any organization.  Several organizations buy Workforce Timekeeper just for that functionality. 

There are many ways to record an employee’s PTO in Workforce Timekeeper. The four most common are:

So it’s the middle of the week and you receive a time off request from one of your employees. You know, that nice form that you can’t file away until you record it in the employee’s timecard. The time off request is not for another month. Do you wait it out, hoping the paper request doesn't get lost? How about making life easier for both you and your employee by recording that vacation time in the employee’s schedule? 

Let's talk about something that is near and dear to some I am sure (or at least a big part of your day!). Scheduling employees with Workforce Timekeeper. How and why are schedules used with Workforce Timekeeper? The first decision when implementing Workforce Scheduler is based on your company's needs. A hospital that I am working with needs a detailed and feature-rich application. Basic scheduling in Workforce Timekeeper will not work for them. For one thing, they need to have access to the Schedule Planner Genie in order to schedule employees by job. Scheduling by an Organizational Map job is only available with the Advanced Scheduler. There are also additional products that can be used to auto-generate schedules for Workforce Timekeeper employees like Workload Generator. The rest of this entry will be written towards Workforce Managers interested in getting started with basic scheduling. Even with basic scheduling, schedules can be viewed on a report or the 4500 terminal. This ensures the employee has visibility to the assigned schedule for the week.

A customer of ours has engaged us to help them re-engineer their Kronos timekeeping and scheduling environment.  We recently suggested to them that upgrading to the latest version of Kronos from their slightly earlier version might be desirable as part of the project already underway.  Although some leeway was granted to do a test upgrade and assess the pros and cons, the idea was nixed before a formal review was completed.

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.