Earlier this year, SAP and Kronos confirmed their new strategic partnership, announcing the new SAP Time Management solution by Kronos. Since then, we have been inundated with requests and questions from organizations curious about what this means for them and how this change fits into their existing human capital management (HCM) landscape. Many common questions are always being asked as we work with organizations that are considering an SAP time management solution.
The top three things people want to know are as follows: Why should we be looking at SuccessFactors Employee Central Time versus SAP Time Management by Kronos? How does SAP Time Management by Kronos integrate with SuccessFactors Employee Central? How will implementing this solution improve our business? In this blog, I will go through each question, and answer them based on our experience to date.
Why should we be looking at SuccessFactors Employee Central versus SAP Time Management by Kronos?
Simply put, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time is for organizations that need global absence management capabilities with basic support for time tracking and overtime calculations. If you have a more complex environment, SAP Time Management by Kronos supports workforce scheduling, time tracking for hourly workers, and advanced leave management capabilities.
The rule of thumb that we use is that if your employee population is primarily white collar or salaried with low complexity time requirements, then SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time is usually the solution of choice. If your company has an employee population that includes blue collar or hourly paid workers with more complex time requirements (maybe you are a manufacturer with production facilities or a retailer with many stores), then SAP Time Management by Kronos is the recommended go-to solution.
If you operate under the jurisdiction of a union, workers council, or something similar that involves additional employee contract complexity, SAP Time Management by Kronos is also the go-to solution. Finally, if you have requirements around staff planning or a tool to assist you with the scheduling of your employees, then SAP Time Management by Kronos is the best solution due to its advanced and optimized scheduling modules. However, when we work with organizations during the evaluation process, we always recommend they carry out a basic discovery to understand what the best fit is for them.
How does SAP Time Management by Kronos integrate with SuccessFactors Employee Central?
The integration between SuccessFactors and SAP Time Management by Kronos is a hot topic for many of our customers and prospects. They always want to understand how the Time Management solution integrates as an end-to-end solution with HR and payroll modules, namely Employee Central and Employee Central Payroll. Organizations want to know if the processes between these modules will run smoothly and if additional resources will be needed to keep the system running properly, especially at key times such as the end of pay periods.
SAP Time Management by Kronos is built upon the Kronos D5 platform that leverages new industry best technologies to work seamlessly with organizations’ existing systems. Part of the D5 platform is a robust and extensible API layer that uses Dell Boomi tools to enable simplified integration to almost any third-party system. However, one of the big benefits with SAP Time Management by Kronos is that it comes with out-of-the-box template integrations to many common solutions, including SuccessFactors modules. Employee Central seamlessly integrates using packaged, direct API integration, or you could take a pre-built flat file template approach, still leveraging the D5 API layer, which many of our customers are currently doing.
There is also the benefit of pre-packaged scheduled integration for payroll data via file transfer from SAP Time Management by Kronos to Employee Central Payroll. Again, this is a popular choice for our customers. Whichever approach you take, rest assured these integrations are automated and feel seamless. They should not require any high maintenance when implemented. You can switch them on and let them go. Finally, one other element to consider is the unified interface that gives visibility to SAP Time Management by Kronos information within the SuccessFactors user interface. This allows time data to be displayed in user tiles when accessing SuccessFactors, without having to go into the time module.
How will implementing SAP Time Management by Kronos improve our business?
Implementing SAP Time Management by Kronos brings a whole heap of benefits to an organization, including the ability to control labor costs through reducing overtime, decreasing absences, eliminating non-productive time, and using improved timekeeping processes. There is also the drive to improve productivity and minimize compliance risks.
All of these are benefits that we see SAP Time Management by Kronos helping organizations achieve in abundance. However, the solution also brings so much more to the party. It has been designed from the ground up with user experience and employee engagement in mind. In this new era of workforce management and a multigenerational workforce, companies who see the competitive advantage this system brings are able to retain top talent and keep employees engaged so they are ambassadors for the company.
SAP Time Management by Kronos has been developed to work in a responsive way—this means that whatever device it is used on, it will always look and feel similar to the end user. And this familiarity across devices has the added benefit of reducing training time and costs. It enables employees to work how they want to and wherever they are—whether at home on their tablet, on a bus using their mobile device, or in their work location on their desktop.
Users now have the ability to carry out work tasks such as requesting vacation, requesting to swap shifts with a colleague, or viewing accrual balances wherever they are, without any feature loss. Managers can get in on the act too. Whether the user is a retail store manager who is walking the store floor helping customers or a manufacturing supervisor who is at the production line coaching employees, the solution allows managers to react to information quicker, spend more time working on strategic tasks, and not be locked away behind a desk in a backroom.
Another benefit of the solution is that it comes built with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology. This means that the solution can help you prevent errors and anticipate problems before they occur. SAP Time Management by Kronos recommend the best schedules to create and when to approve or not approve time off. In fact, if you want it to, it can auto-approve employee requests based on your business rules, taking away time-consuming administrative tasks from your managers. Instead, managers can now get access to real-time data that helps them make proactive decisions that improve the business.
In addition to common questions, organizations want to know many other things regarding functionality, usability, and the implementation process as they start to look at SAP Time Management by Kronos. Many other valuable features come standard with the solution, so we always recommend that organizations meet with us to analyze the solution and demonstrate how it can meet specific challenges unique to their organizations. This approach gives organizations the opportunity to see for themselves the benefits that SAP Time Management by Kronos can bring.
To learn more about how GP Strategies can assist you on your journey to Kronos, contact us.
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