BFL Clocks Labour Hours With Kronos Solution

Imagine the first of the month is round the corner. Mounting piles of worksheets, mounds and mounds of payroll papers, stacks of leave applications are giving the HR manager and yourself headaches no drug can cure. And yet, after so much of work and sweat, the numbers don’t tally and there are workers, who claim they were wronged. Yes, the first of the month is always a long day.

However, Bharat Forge Limited (BFL), which has a 10,000 strong, highly-skilled, global base of engineers and technicians at its various manufacturing locations, decided to convert this pain into a gain for its employees as well as the company. “Managing this diversified workforce and ensuring accurate payroll calculation with a manual system and an outdated automated system was no easy task,” says Yogesh Zope, vice president-IT, BFL. This is where Kronos came to their rescue and made everybody’s life easier with its workforce management solution.

By tying up with Kronos, BFL deployed a completely automated solution that has helped them cut down on the extensive time taken for payroll processing. “We selected Kronos’ Workforce Central Suite, comprising applications such as Workforce Timekeeper, Workforce Manager WTK, Workforce Employee WTK, Workforce Accruals, and Workforce Connect,” says Zope. The company had been looking for an integrated time and attendance system to replace their outdated time clocks, which threw up a lot of reconciliation issues during pay calculations.

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“Among other things, it did not give us the desired visibility on the shop floor. For instance, it was fairly difficult for a shift supervisor to arrange for a new shift quickly as he would not have the information regarding workers’ attendance, who has been working for how many hours and in which bay, etc. For this sort of information, the shift manager would have to go to the HR department, which in turn would compile the information based on the time clock.”

“The process used to take several hours and was not as fruitful as we would have liked it to be,” says Zope. BFL also decided to install self-service kiosks in and around the production bays, which not only collect attendance, but also enable their employees to perform tasks related to leave and attendance.
Besides this, BFL had numerous pay practices, which varied by time of work, the number of hours put in, the departments worked, the number of days worked and a diverse employee population with full-time duty, casual duty, contract terms, trainees, etc. Also, activities like application for leave, application for overtime duty, short leave, shift change, etc, required manual forms, which had to be submitted to HR for eventual reconciliation.

With the implementation of the time and attendance solution, BFL eliminated over 6,000 manual leave cards, got rid of its outdated time clocks and made employees independent by installing several self-service terminals at different locations within its manufacturing units.

The deployment also empowered managers to view/ approve online employee time cards, leave cards, OD cards, short leave requests, etc; significantly reduce the number of manual payroll entries; and increase employee satisfaction through smooth HR processes. Managers can now easily track their employees’ time at work, leave, on-premise reports and other information in real-time.

“The success of the initiative hinged on the acceptance of the system by the workers and hence, managers put a lot of emphasis on getting their employees trained in some of these systems, especially the self-service kiosks,” says Zope. “For those from the officer cadre, it didn’t require much training, but we continue to train and familiarise our workers with the system and address their issues.”

According to James Thomas, country manager, India Operations, Kronos, the concept of an integrated, real-time Workforce Management (WFM) solution is pretty nascent in India. “Most of the time, organisations are flying partially blind with regard to the operational visibility of the workforce. They are yet to come to terms with the fact that a lot of leakages exist at the operational level while managing labour hours against pay hours; one must not forget that labour is one of the single largest controllable operating expenses. This has a direct impact on both top line (through productivity enhancements) and bottom line (through cost savings),” he adds.

Thomas further says that an integrated workforce management solution can alleviate the above challenges significantly and enable organisations to manage human resources better by controlling labour costs, minimising compliance risks, and enhancing workforce productivity all at the same time through exception-based management in real time.

The initial results of the deployment have been more than promising. Zope says that their employees are happy with the system as they no longer need to go to the time office to get information like leave balance, attendance status, etc. All these functionalities are available within the production bay on the self-service kiosks, which also register their attendance. “They are especially happy because now they are relieved of the burden of manual timesheets and record keeping,” concludes Zope. Apart from empowering employees, it has also curbed productivity loss due to the elimination of employee visits to the time office.