North Carolina city chooses time and attendance monitoring tool
Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the Tar Heel state, has selected a workforce management system from Chelmsford, Mass.-based Kronos Inc. to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk and improve productivity.
The system the Greensboro administration selected will be used with the TeleStaff product from Kronos that is already implemented in the city’s public safety departments. The time and attendance system was selected because the city needed to standardize and automate processes to control overpayments of leave and misinterpretations of policies.
Another reason for the selection: the company offered the city a rent-to-own purchasing option, which minimized up-front costs with fixed monthly payments. The option provides a mechanism to fund the project costs over a four-year period, while reaping the benefits of the system in less than a year. The city also chose Kronos’ cloud services offering, which will allow it to outsource maintenance of the IT infrastructure to Kronos to ensure that the application is current and performing at an optimal level.
One of the major issues the city was looking to resolve with the acquisition was that some departments were at risk of non-compliance with U.S. Department of Labor regulations. The new system will help eliminate manual workforce management processes to reduce errors and minimize compliance risk. In the manual system, delays in leave request slips could be significant. With the new system, labor information will be available within 72 hours for management to review for more effective decision-making.
The city also will have more control in payroll processing. The application will capture the actual work hours weekly while retaining a semi-monthly pay cycle. “In the face of budget constraints and the perceived lack of public confidence in the way government employees are managed, we are excited to have Kronos to enhance accountability. We are also certain that the solution will yield significant cost savings,” said Chryste Hofer, the city’s deputy chief information officer.
With the new time and attendance monitoring tool, Greensboro city employees will have multiple user interface options available based on their work location and responsibility in the organization. Users at various locations will have the option to log in via smart phone devices, computers or swipe card units with biometric verification devices.