Time After Time

Workforce management technologies are on the rise. We speak with Infor WFM Workbrain’s Owen Brangwyn and NOVAtime’s Brian Harris about the importance of keeping track of your employees.

How can workforce management technology be of particular benefit in cutting costs and increasing productivity in a difficult business environment?
Owen Brangwyn. It is important, regardless of the economy, to ensure your workforce is properly aligned to your business needs. During challenging economic times this becomes even more critical and we see the most profitable companies ensure there is the right coverage at the right times to keep costs low and productivity high. The challenge for many companies is the ability to accurately see their entire workforce, identify areas for improvement and then implement necessary changes.

Large workforces become very complex and can strain many workforce management systems. Infor WFM Workbrain thrives on complex labor challenges to help companies more accurately align their workforce. This alignment directly impacts our customer’s bottom line by removing unnecessary activities and administrative tasks. Additionally, proper planning and insight into a company’s workforce needs helps reduce over-staffing and this leads to a reduction in total payroll expenses. This has been seen time and time again and recently highlighted in our customer’s quarterly earnings.

Brian Harris. Understanding where your employees, or workforce, are at any given moment through real-time tools helps any company make better decisions and also ensure proper resource levels against productivity requirements. Workforce management solutions also ensure that employees are working as scheduled and not hitting company cost centers when not scheduled or maximum budget hours for any given job or department have been reached. Because payroll is typically the highest expense in most companies, the use of workforce management solutions to automate and enforce pay polices almost always contributes to significant cost savings. As adoption and workforce management usage increases in a company, so does the productivity and savings.

Another important factor in the productivity for companies is truly understanding what internal departments and jobs actually cost. Time and Attendance, or Workforce Management, solutions give companies the information to understand where the true costs are in their products or service offerings.

And as workforces become more mobile and autonomous are systems that track time and attendance still relevant?
BH. Absolutely. The fact that workforces are becoming more mobile as the standard ‘brick-and-mortar’ business models decrease, it is maybe more important to understand what your employees are doing at any given moment and be able to do labor and job costing real time.  Workforce management solutions provide tools including mobile platforms, PDA integration, and interactive phone systems for management to gain visibility into these remote employees and effectively manage them. With today’s economic and demanding business environments, it is important to create cultures of accountability and efficiency and that is what workforce management solutions provide.

OB. The ability to work anytime, anywhere creates an even greater need to track and understand what your employees are working on. Mobile and autonomous workforces create a higher level of complexity in driving labor productivity. The most progressive companies are utilizing workforce management to track time via web-enabled capture devices regardless of where the employee is located. For example, Infor WFM Workbrain provides real-time compliance to help customers control working hours and stop potential regulatory or operational breaches from occurring whether their employees are located on premise or not. The data captured by our system remotely aids scheduling and other operational decisions in real-time and for future planning processes.

Can time and attendance systems provide benefits for workers as well as their employers?
OB. As the functions of time and attendance have evolved there is evidence that employees actively seek employers who offer interaction with their systems, underscoring the benefit that employees find in advanced software. Infor WFM Workbrain removes the headaches of paper-based processes such as personal leave requests. These become a self-service function that expedites the approval process and updates the timesheet in advance. This also reduces queries as fewer exceptions occur at timesheet sign-off time. Workers have access to end of week time and pay data, which helps reduce payroll and other administrative queries. Some employers use Infor WFM Workbrain to allow their employees to request training, apply for updated licences, or update basic HR data such as contact information or availability for overtime and additional shifts.

Some can now bid for shifts or trade them amongst each other with no management intervention. It is the system that governs and validates who can participate in any of these functions. Benefits such as these are a significant factor in increasing employee satisfaction. Our customers find they can differentiate themselves from the competition to attract and, just as importantly, keep the best assets they have: employees.

BH. When properly implemented, workforce management solutions often provide a wide variety of self-service tools for employees to become part of the overall solution and become more involved in their own daily management. From time off requests to viewing of benefit hours and pay, these self-service tools minimize the need for routine requests to management. Another component of workforce management solutions that people often don’t realize is the consistent enforcement of attendance and pay rules. Employees that consistently abuse the system are now highlighted and this will often increase morale of employees who focus on the health of their company. Morale and productivity are two great benefits for any workforce. When evaluating feasibility and ROI on these projects, companies need to understand the intangible benefits to employees as well as the ‘hard’ costs that can be saved through the implementation of Time and Attendance solutions.

What do you predict are going to be the major growth areas in time and attendance technology over the coming months and years?
BH. Software as a Service (SaaS) will continue to be an increasing trend in the time and attendance market. Because these solutions are developing so rapidly and time and attendance functionality is becoming more and more integrated with payroll and HR functions, it makes sense for companies to leverage SaaS models so that these companies can stay current with functionality offerings without having to constantly upgrade applications (and possibly infrastructure). The use of SaaS models for time and attendance enables best practices in all HR/Payroll areas while letting companies focus on their core strategies.

The continued development of employee self-services and platforms to enable self-service (i.e. clocks, web services, etc.) will also play an important role in the increased adoption of time and attendance solutions. As barriers and myths are broken surrounding ‘big brother’ (biometrics, tracking, etc.) and employees realize that Workforce Management solutions enable companies to control costs and ultimately succeed, employees will embrace the technology and process that come along with these solutions.

The last area of significant growth will be the integration of time and attendance with external applications. Because of the need to leverage real time data with secondary systems and Enterprise applications suites, time and attendance providers will continue the development of flexible middleware and communications strategies (web services) to provide the interface with these systems. Companies realize that the information gathered in time and attendance systems often provide the missing piece to the puzzle in truly understanding and controlling labor costs.

OB. We have seen an increasing emphasis on delivering real-time information to a diverse array of devices that need to interact with a centralized installation. Different metrics, KPI’s and analysis are required to inform users of changing operational circumstances as they happen. This tight integration with business process also leads to requirements to be alerted to impending events in real-time so that changes can be made or elements of the workforce redeployed to react to the situation before a problem occurs. We expect to see a continuation of this trend and an increasingly tight integration to POS machines, clocks, handheld and other devices.

Similarly, a trend is growing to simpler out of the box integration to financial, front-of-house operational and back-office systems. Users want to leverage information seamlessly between diverse applications with reduced overall ownership costs. The key is the ability to deliver actionable information sourced from a variety of systems and deliver this in real time across roles and the organization.

Brian Harris serves as the Director of Professional Services for NOVAtime, overseeing all customer-facing activity from pre-sales to support. Having served nearly 20 years in the nation’s largest consulting firms, Brian focuses on the alignment of process and technology with today’s ever changing business-critical issues and demanding workplace environments.

During a decade spent analyzing and understanding complex optimized scheduling challenges, Owen Brangwyn has implemented Workforce Management solutions at some of EMEA’s biggest retailers. He spent three years with Workbrain in EMEA as a senior pre-sales consultant before moving to Toronto, Canada, in early 2008 to take up his current role as Product Manager for Infor WFM Workbrain.