Kronos Transaction Assistant - The smartest dumb application
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.
But sometimes Kronos reminds me of the supersmart nerdy guy we all knew in high school. You know, the guy who could recite pi to 20 significant digits and was taking calculus classes at the local college when he was 15, but wore geeky glasses and played Dungeons and Dragons with his nerd friends every hour that he wasn’t mastering Tetris. There are a couple of gaping holes in the 
Kronos timekeeping application that are just one right-brain thought away from being filled in. But alas, they have been gaping holes for a long time, and the fillers are nowhere in sight.
If you’ve worked with Kronos Timekeeper for any length of time, you probably have your list of pet peeves. I’ve got a few (see this blog for more articles on them), and my main one is Transaction Assistant.
To cut straight to the chase, the Kronos Transaction Assistant is the smartest dumb application I know. I mean, it’s really smart. The error that it detects is coded in XML, just waiting for either the data or the environmental deficiency (e.g. an undefined labor level value) that caused the error to be fixed. Fix it, click resubmit, and Voila! The transaction is applied and all is well. Isn’t that smart? Yup, sure is.
So you see an error on the screen. Who is it for? Simple enough question, right? The application knows, right? Well, yes it does. Will it tell you? Well, no it won’t. Why not? Duh, you think I should? Yeah I do – and by the way, here’s your sign…
Or maybe the error is a badge number that was given to an employee, but has not yet been assigned to that employee on the system. This happens all the time to a client of mine. Wouldn’t it be nice to filter the error list based on a type of error (e.g. badge number not found), and actually show the badge number that was not found? Then you could resubmit all the errors at once, rather than hunt around the error list for the 4 punches for the badge number that you just resolved.
Or how about displaying all of the errors in the list for a single person? A person has incomplete information on Kronos, and you wonder if their transactions have been rejecting for the last week. So you’d like to display all the transactions in Transaction Assistant for Joe Fleaflicker for the past week or two. Dream on…
Next post I'll get into some 'nitty-gritty' details of this tool.