The "Kronos Guy" Blog

Happy New Year!

Checking the Kronos Employee Import

Remember Genies can be created to show lots of employee based info.  If you are in the Kronos implementation phase and having troubles with the Employee Import, you should create a genie with as much of the important employee information as you can.  This way an average user can easily Select All  / Export to Excel and they can tell you what is wrong with it.

Oh those fond memories of Mom standing in my door telling me to clean up my room...But I didn't use it!!!  It’s not mine!!! It's too hard and there's WAY too much stuff! No matter, just put it back where it belongs. Who am I kidding? I still hear this from my wife!  These same rules apply to Workforce Timekeeper.

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?

Last we spoke, we were discussing how Kronos Workforce Timekeeper affects the payroll process.  Well, we got half way there.  Follow along as we finish our trip. 

Once a pay period has closed, the payroll process begins. Basically, the payroll process incorporates preparing the time collected in Kronos Workforce Timekeeper, reviewing and validating that data, then sending it over to your payroll system. Your payroll system then processes the data and does many things, the most important of which is to provide pay checks or direct deposits to employees.

My father used to ask his young engineer recruits “Where were you when the page was blank?” when they complained about the design of something existing that they had to interface too.  On the face of it the question implies they should have spoken up much earlier. The subtext, however, was usually that since the design often pre-dated the young engineer’s birth he or she may not yet have sufficient seniority to be disparaging other’s designs.  It also reminded people that the original designers designed to the original requirements not to what came along years later with new concepts, methods, tools, or technologies in the mix. So basically if you weren’t in the room when all those requirements were being discovered and decided upon then you probably have no basis to comment.  Until my father’s engineers learned this they weren’t invited to anymore design discussions.

Last fall, I decided to take a walk to clear my head between battles with some software that was frustrating me. My walk took me through some public parkland and an adjacent golf course. Part of the golf course has been closed for a few years due to drainage problems caused by seepage from a deteriorating dam. The dam was rebuilt in the past year. The fairway grass looked much shorter than last year indicating that it had been mowed sometime this summer (last year it was a few feet tall in places), and recent months had been fairly dry so I decided to take a shortcut down one of the fairways. Well, it wasn't a shortcut. I ended up zigzagging my way down the fairway in search of the high spots as much of the fairway was boggy. Which is comparable to how I felt when I was getting frustrated by the software a few moments earlier.

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