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Kronos Incorporated – Workforce Management
Overview
Kronos Incorporated is an American company based in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the United States and deals in multinational human capital management and workforce management cloud providers. The company was founded by Mark S. Ain, an alumnus of Simon Business School Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1977. The company is a significant player in the software industry.
Operations
Kronos Company offers services that deal in labor analytics, absence management, scheduling, hiring, human resource and payroll, time, and attendance. To respond and keep in touch with the current trends in the software business market, the company has enlarged its service delivery and developed web-based digital and recent versions of software that enables its customers to access both hosted and installed subscription versions of their services and products. The company’s primary services are Workforce Dimensions that deals in operating insights and data analysis, Workforce Ready dealing in pre-hire to retire, and Workforce Central that deals in the frontline to the C-suite (Taghiyar et al., 200). The company offers specialized services and products, including Workforce Auto Time, which automates labor management for defense and aerospace, Workforce Planner dealing in automated labor scheduling, and EZCall, which manages on call physician schedules.
Area Covered
The company is located in Lowell in the United States and has sub-offices in Canada and the U.S. The company has other properties and branches in Brazil, Mexico, Sweden, Spain, United Arab Emirates, China, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Marketing and Sales
The company serves institutions in the education department, business services, energy, health, government, hospitality, manufacturing, retail markets, financial markets, and logistics. The company serves over thirty thousand organizations and over forty million people. Kronos makes direct sales to its clients as well as through partnership agreements with the service company’s and software-hardware firms (Taghiyar et al., 139). Its customers mainly include Forest City Enterprises, JMA Outreach Solutions, Winthrop University Hospital, University of Toronto, Hannaford Supermarket, and County of Santa Clara.
Services offered through merger and acquisition
The company has an acquisition strategy that includes purchasing independent distributors and resellers of its services and products and purchasing software industries that have applications that expand the company’s product line. In 2013 the company purchased Timeline Company, its main rival in the workforce management software industry. In 2015 the company bought Auto Time Company from Kaba Workforce Solution, labor management, and time and attendance (Escriva et al., 127). The same year they purchased Productive Scheduling Solutions based in Chicago and operating in the healthcare market.
Benefits of MIS
Time and Attendance Software Service
Through the use of Kronos Time and Attendance Software service, an organization can minimize and cut on labor costs, manage compliance risks, improve employee productivity, and make employee time monitoring easy. This is done through labor intensives timecard tracking, simplified approval processing, and data entry, which reduces the administrative cost and time across the institution, connected with employee inquiries and attendance exceptions (Escriva et al., 123). All this is done while the company minimizes compliance risk and overpayments. Through Kronos’ automated time and attendance, the organization can eliminate worker time theft, improve payroll accuracy and efficiency, and improve employee satisfaction. Through data collection, the company can minimize compliance risk, reduce data entry errors, improve employee productivity, and enforce pay and attendance policies (Smith 130). Kronos provides a digital labor tracking software that will enable any organization to give real-time visibility on their operations, provide comprehensive services, and be reliable through the use of easy to use technology.
Kronos Company programming systems enables the management of organizations from all levels of the company to have the ability to identify and analyze the trending issues and complaints and to be able to stop and control the damage before any significant loss in time or money (Reiman 65). By collecting information using the analytic data collection program, the management of any organization can assess employee problems and considerable losses on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis rather than waiting for the quarterly reports to analyze and solve issues. An organization that uses data collection systems can save on funds used during collecting, tabulating, and distributing paper punch cards and employee attendance report papers.
Disadvantages of MIS
The disadvantages of using the services of Kronos are based on the problems that come with the services’ applications. The In Touch application, which is responsible for collecting information based on labor costs, overtime figures, and absenteeism, enables the company’s owners and management to focus on the targeted sturdy but comes with the burden of staff training, which is expensive (Michalopoulos et al., 185). To effectively use the application, staff need to have expert training from professional instructors to operate the application, which may be costly to the organization. Learning to use the application is also time-consuming. It is expensive for a small business to perform system updates and system modifications that require time and funds.
Kronos application deals with collecting a bulk amount of information and data, which requires expert management and storage. Employees and supervisors from small companies who are used with dealing with little data and managers who are not well ad versant with the new forms of data formats may find it overwhelming to deal with the search and research options which are part of Kronos applications (Escriva et al., 170). For managers and staff from an organization used to investigate data from narrow questions, the considerable sample information for study created by the applications may provide the management with a tough, sturdy time.
Works Cited
Escriva, Robert, et al. “Kronos: The design and implementation of an event ordering service.” Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Computer Systems. 2014.
Michalopoulos, Panos, et al. “Development of an Integrated Simulation Package for Freeway Design, Operations and Adaptive Traffic Management. Phase I: Enhancement of the Kronos Simulation Program.” (2015).
Reiman, Timber. Kronos, Incorporated, and Healthcare Financial Management Association. “Time is money–labour analysis toolkit.” Healthcare financial management: journal of the Healthcare Financial Management Association 56.11 (2012): suppl-1.
Smith, Justin N. “Payroll management using networked client peripherals.” U.S. Patent No. 9,286,640. 15 Mar. 2016.
Taghiyar, M. Jafar, et al. “Kronos: a workflow assembler for genome analytics and informatics.” Gigascience 6.7 (2017): gix042.