Anglican Retirement Villages Puts Faith in Kronos® Workforce Central for Comprehensive Rostering, Improved Labour Management and Costing.
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Anglican Retirement Villages (ARV) is a leading provider of aged care facilities with 32 retirement villages & services across the greater Sydney region. ARV provides three types of aged care: independent living villages; care for people living at home; and residential aged care hostels and nursing homes. ARV currently employees in the region of 1,800 staff delivering care to around 5,000 residents and clients.
The implementation of the Kronos Workforce Central®, workforce management system, and integration with existing systems, has enabled more efficient and cost-effective rostering of staff across all 32 facilities and home carer environments. The automation of workforce management related processes has effectively eliminated paper-based processes, and associated errors, for payroll management.
The organisation now has more consistent application of workplace awards, reduced employee attendance irregularities and provides management with real-time performance data designed to improve the day-to-day running and quality of service.
Manual systems led to poor coordination
Founded in 1959 as a home for retired clergy and church workers, Anglican Retirement Villages has earned an enviable reputation for providing quality care in independent living and low- and high-level assisted living and community care. ARV seeks to apply standards of corporate governance that are at least equivalent to, and in many respects remain higher than, the standards expected of publicly-listed companies. Their aim is to become the quality benchmark for aged care services in Australia.
In common with most organisations in the aged care industry, Anglican Retirement Villages must manage a large workforce with a high proportion of shift workers. By 2004, it became apparent that inefficient payroll management was preventing the organisation from delivering the best opportunities for staff.
"Staff would fill in time sheets and then managers would compile the timesheet detail into an Excel spreadsheet," says Andrew McLachlan, Group Human Resources Manager, Anglican Retirement Villages. "These spreadsheets would be transferred manually to the payroll system."
"Each facility had to manage its own staff, and there was no visibility across multiple facilities. This meant there were some staff who wanted to work more hours but couldn’t get them, while other facilities couldn’t find enough people to fill their shifts."
The board was becoming increasingly concerned about the ad-hoc system of recording and taking leave, which made it impossible to accurately calculate the organisation’s leave liability. As an organisation ARV were also committed to applying employment awards more consistently across the organisation, which was at that point in time being calculated manually by pay staff.
"I was brought into the company in early 2004 to begin the process of selecting and implementing an organisation-wide workforce management system," says Shaun Foo, Information Systems Project Manager, Anglican Retirement Villages. "We went through rigorous selection methodologies that were more suited to a large enterprise than an organisation our size. But we wanted to be confident we were making an educated decision that achieved the best possible result."
Kronos Workforce Central delivers information and integration
After identifying its business requirements and narrowing the field down to three finalists, Anglican Retirement Villages selected Kronos Workforce Central, specifically configured for Aged Care.
"Kronos could demonstrate its strength as an organisation – it had been around for a long time and we were comfortable it would still be there in the future," says McLachlan. "We saw a discipline in the way Kronos handled bug fixes and updates that ensured the stability of the product. And we had faith in their customer support system."
Working directly with Kronos, Anglican Retirement Villages implemented Kronos Workforce Central. After a pilot project at one site in April 2005, the aged care organisation rolled the software out across all its residential facilities by December of the same year, all Community Care by February 2006 and completed an organisation-wide upgrade to the latest version in July 2006.
Automated award calculations and advanced rostering
Kronos Workforce Central captures employees' punch-in and punch-out times using Kronos 4500 Touch ID and Badge Terminals. Captured hours are automatically interpreted according to the relevant awards and correct annual, sick, and training leave accruals calculated.
Anglican Retirement Villages used Kronos Workforce Connect to integrate the Kronos software with its existing Frontier Software Chris21 payroll system. Workforce Connect is an easy-to-use, flexible data integration tool that efficiently interfaces Kronos’s products with other critical business applications. The use of proven technologies to transfer data to and from common payroll applications, enterprise resource planning and human resources management systems has enabled a seamless and completely connected end to end solution for workforce management.
"We use the Kronos Workforce Scheduler module to roster staff according to their skills, availability and cost, which means we can better plan staffing levels," says Foo. "Kronos also built a series of custom screens for our home carers to track their visits. We integrated these with our client database and sales system so now our home care rosters are generated automatically."
"Kronos were very good to deal with; they really helped us get over the line. After implementation, their support was still very good, we had no issues whatsoever."
Boosting accuracy and saving time
Automating the time and attendance management process has increased the accuracy of payroll while reducing the workload on human resources staff.
"Our payroll people have more time to do value-added tasks and provide high-level customer service instead of interpreting 1,000 pay sheets each pay cycle," says Mr McLachlan. "In fact, we have reduced the number of people working on payroll as a result. Eliminating all that manual processing has also taken away a lot of errors. There are fewer adjustments after each pay cycle."
"The implementation of the Kronos Workforce Central solution has pushed back responsibility to the managers to make sure staff payments are correct. It has also helped get rid of the culture of blame. The managers know that what they enter and approve in the system is what people will be paid."
The Kronos software and terminals have increased discipline in timekeeping and reduced the opportunities for fraud.
"People clock on and off using a fingerprint scan or barcode, so what gets worked gets paid," says McLachlan. "The software ensures the awards are applied and interpreted consistently, which keeps staff happy and will also save the organisation money in the long run."
Efficient workforce management
The centralised Kronos software has given Anglican Retirement Villages visibility across all its facilities and entire workforce, with dividends in efficiency.
"We introduced a program called JobMatch that matches staff who wanted more hours with facilities that need more staff," says McLachlan. "We have a cluster of sites in the Castle Hill area and we can assign staff much more efficiently across all of them."
The ability to aggregate data across the organisation in real time has been a boon for management.
"Previously payroll reports would come out weeks after a pay run and it was hard to know the impacts of replacing or not replacing staff," says McLachlan. "Now managers can see the impact straight away."
"We can now see patterns of employee behaviour that we couldn't before, such as when people are consistently late or forgetting to clock in and out. It gives us supporting evidence if we need to discipline a staff member and generally better information to manage the labour force."
Finding better uses for information
Anglican Retirement Villages is continually finding new ways to benefit from the data captured by the Kronos software.
"There are all sorts of exciting possibilities, such as using proximity devices to track the hours of our home carers," says Foo. "We are working out how to pool data from Kronos and our other systems to produce better information about how we’re caring for clients."
"Managers are beginning to use it as a real management tool to get their costs down," adds McLachlan. "We're encouraging them to play with the system more and find out 'if I do this, what happens' and make better decisions about things like using casuals, full-time and agency staff."
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