Miami Airport Hotels - Businesses Use New Apps For Workplace Scheduling

Source       - http://online.wsj.com/
By             - LAUREN WEBER
Category   - Miami Airport Hotels
Posted By  - Homewood Suites Miami

Miami Airport Hotels

Say you own a thriving bakery that's open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and you have nine full-time employees and 11 part-timers. The shop is busiest between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. and then again from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. How many people do you need on the noon to 6 p.m. shift?

It's a problem that could flummox even someone who aced advanced calculus.

Fortunately, scores of software programs are available to help businesses manage their scheduling conundrums. 

Enterprises with thousands of hourly workers can purchase customized software with lots of bells and whistles, and now there are cloud-based solutions available even to companies with a handful of employees.

The biggest name in the "workforce management" software business, Kronos Inc., offers a product called Workforce Ready that allows small employers to start out with a single application, such as basic scheduling, and then add extra features, from calculating accrued time off to administering payroll. Kronos's more sophisticated product, Workforce Central, lets larger employers oversee a complex multistate or global employee base.

Following the Rules

Staying on top of federal, state and, when necessary, international labor laws is one of the biggest advantages of automating the scheduling process. Many software programs will incorporate those regulations and update automatically if any rules change. Many also allow for the program to be customized based on company-specific rules or union contracts.

That's especially valuable for businesses with some complexity to them. Sabre Holdings Corp., the parent of Travelocity, uses Workforce Central to manage hours for thousands of employees across the globe. Because the application is flexible and easy to use, says Jeanne Jackson, who directs payroll and oversees the Kronos program, Sabre has been able to "react to acquisitions and changes in legislation in the U.S. and outside the country that impact how we capture and report time."

Because they can monitor workers' hours better than traditional methods, the programs also allow employers to keep closer track of employees—reducing overtime, for instance, and syncing up with electronic time clocks to monitor tardiness and break times. 

And scheduling programs offer the ability to integrate with payroll software to tally workers' paychecks, which helps reduce the simple mathematical errors that can plague manual scheduling and payroll processes.

To the Quarter Hour

There are benefits for workers as well. Dayforce software from Ceridian Corp. allows employees to view their schedules online, swap shifts with co-workers and record their availability.

Guitar Center Inc., a music-instrument retailer with around 240 locations, began using Dayforce in 2010 after years of managing schedules with Excel spreadsheets. Now "we load [customer] traffic and transactions in 15-minute intervals into Dayforce, and it generates labor-demand curves that let each store know how many people they should staff for every 15 minutes," says Chris Salles, who oversaw the implementation and is now director of e-learning at the company, based in Westlake Village, Calif.