The Hindu Business Line : Costly drain

Companies generally look at chores such as employee attendance or leave requisition as tasks that need to be automated so as to save on stationery and printing costs.

But errors of computation here can cost them valuable time and money, says Kronos Corporation.

“Because of the complexity of time and attendance tasks, manual systems are vulnerable to costly employee fraud and errors such as buddy punching or extra sick or leave days that are incorrectly given simply because managers are loaded with data. Automating these functions will enable companies to reduce costly payroll errors, increase payroll staff productivity and reduce non-staff payroll costs,” says James Thomas, Country Manager, Kronos.

The Indian market has just started to embrace complete automation in the workforce management space, starting with Time and Attendance, Leave and Absence management and Automatic identification and Data capture of workforce data — all seamlessly integrated into their ERPs, Thomas says. “Currently a lot of manual processes and automation exist in silos in this area across industries.”

By automating workflows related to both — payroll and time and attendance functions — Kronos Workforce Timekeeper will enable companies to improve visibility on labour costs, he says.

Organisations can reduce payroll error rate, payroll staff, payroll processing time, unauthorised leave time and payroll inflation besides saving on time card and better labour reporting, Thomas says.

A Nucleus Research report has revealed that payroll error rate is by far the largest in which organisations recoup cost. “It can be difficult to estimate the error rate because it is entirely due to avoidable human error. Burgeoning employee numbers, shift differentials and collective bargaining agreements have led to an increase in payroll error rate,” states the study.

The study further found that even for companies whose error rate was a mere 0.5 per cent or less of their total payroll, the annual savings often exceeded $1 million.

Quantifying the improvements in its payroll error rate, a manufacturer of heavy equipment said: “We generate 22,000 pay slips every month. Our error rate before the implementation of Kronos Workforce Timekeeper was 200-300 errors per week. We managed to eliminate 80 per cent of them.”

Companies that eWorld spoke to say they ran Kronos timekeeper alongside their old system to observe the error rate.

“With real-time access to employees’ time and labour data, managers can monitor and even forecast overtime use. As a result, we’ve been able to keep a close eye on overtime usage and manage our workforce more effectively in the process. The Kronos system reduced our labour costs and paid for itself in just 15 months,” says a leading Printing organisation.

“Accountability is way up and excess hours are way down. Workforce timekeeper has given us the labour reporting tools we need to support operations management and continue implementing productivity improvements,” says an Automobile Manufacturing organisation.

For employees too, such tools can help bring in accuracy, according to Kronos. Alert employees, for instance, can compute their dues far more accurately in such a system, and, if need be, contest leave pay or other incremental increase in pay.

lnr@thehindu.co.in

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Kronos India eyes growth in services sector
Kronos Inc launches India operations

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