Prior to implementing Kronos’ Workforce Central suite, Western New England College was using a variety of manual and automated systems. They were looking to replace legacy systems that support more than 2,400 faculty, staff and students.

    After a rigorous RFP process, the College selected Kronos because of its single-source offering and best-in-class solutions. "We had two goals to accomplish. The first was to deploy a solution that integrated time and labor with HR and payroll activities and the second was an aggressive five-month implementation timeframe. Kronos’ single-source offering combined with their extensive knowledge and experience implementing solutions in higher education made them the only vendor to meet our requirements," said Allyn Chase, director, Office of Information Technology, Western New England College. "The Kronos team rose to the challenge. It was their wealth of industry and product knowledge that helped us meet our product selection criteria and implementation goals."

    There were a number of challenges to meet during the four-month rollout. Every PC on each campus had to be configured, some hardware was upgraded or replaced, a server room was constructed on the main campus, six Timekeeper terminals were installed, all existing and legacy HR and Payroll data was converted, and over 450 users were trained.

    Since completion of the rollout, the college is expected to experienced significant time-savings and cost-effective benefits by streamlining labor intensive processes. The legacy systems required users to report hours worked at one central location, which was inefficient and inconvenient. Faculty, staff and students are now documenting labor hours with Kronos 4500 badge terminals, which are located throughout the campus. College staff at off-campus locations also have access to the Workforce Central suite. The Kronos solution is convenient and eliminates payroll errors, which improves employee satisfaction and productivity.

    "Higher education institutions have unique employee relationship management issues with a highly diverse workforce of employee students who work multiple jobs, faculty, part-time and full-time, hourly and salaried, and with many remote and mobile employees. Western New England is addressing all of these workforce needs in one system--an innovative approach that is a model for others in higher education to follow," said Michael DiPietro, vice president of product and industry marketing at Kronos. "Our employee-centric solutions allow Western New England College to align employee performance with organizational goals. We look forward to helping Western New England College meet their objectives to improve the educational experience for the students by managing administrative costs.