Workforce Management Solutions Automating Business Processes

Jahan Jamshidi, Director- IT, Aztec Shops

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Jahan Jamshidi, Director- IT, Aztec Shops

Aztec Shops, a retail operation located in the San Diego State University campus, has been using a comprehensive suite of solutions, including time and attendance, employee scheduling, and HR/Payroll applications from global workforce management software provider Kronos for more than seven years. The workforce management suite automates critical workforce business processes to help control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve productivity. But to reap these benefits, the retail operation had to maintain different servers per application that required additional resources and logistical planning to ensure that the system was up and running at all times.

To solve this problem, Aztec Shops’ IT department chose to deploy the Kronos Cloud solution. This deployment was the university’s first-ever move to Cloud – and the project has been deemed extremely successful in terms of business continuity, customer satisfaction, and reduction in the amount of drawing on additional employee resources. Aztec Shops is now collaborating with other entities on campus, including the CIO’s office, to help implement Cloud in their IT areas and to provide more efficient operations for the entire campus community. Here is what we achieved with workforce management deployed in Cloud:

Provided Business Continuity

As a retail operation, Aztec Shops must insure that business is conducted as usual, despite unforeseen circumstances. IT needs to ensure that such will be the case.

For example, during natural disasters such as major fires in California when massive power outages occur, we must be able to maintain system integrity. With critical business information now contained in Cloud, we are able to continue our operations without interruption, and thus reduce the impact on our bottom line. Now when the campus experiences a power outage, we still have access to employee schedules, can contact them as needed, and staff our operations so that business will go on as usual.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Our shoppers are young, technologically savvy, with shopping options available at their fingertips; the phones in their pockets are essentially our competitors. We stand to lose competitive edge if we don’t offer optimal, uninterrupted customer service at all times, because our bottom line depends largely on satisfied, repeat customers. To achieve this, we need to provide in-person interaction with knowledgeable and helpful staff.

Increased Employee Engagement

Our workforce is mostly part-time and mostly students who work to help finance their education. And so we must adjust our business operations to coincide with the crunch times as well as the steady times that occur with each semester. Thus, the beginning of each semester can see a dramatic increase in student population and so our temporary student work force may grow to 1,000 whereas during the rest of the semester it levels out at about 760. Having a reliable system that can process large numbers of applications as well as enable the HR department to efficiently conduct the hiring process for the suitable candidates is indispensable.

“Our shoppers are young, technologically savvy, with shopping options available at their fingertips; the phones in their pockets are essentially our competitors”

For example, the advanced scheduling tool that provides access to students’ schedules regarding classes, lunch time, free time etc. provides information we need to reach peak staffing levels for our needs while also being flexible so that the students can successfully pursue their academic progress. In addition, the workforce management system offers managers and employees the ability to accommodate last minute schedule swaps, so common in a campus environment, from any location where they have access to the system.

Security

A much appreciated benefit of workforce management in Cloud is the system’s improved overall security.The system holds employees’ private information in a secure environment without the need of our own network security staff.

In Conclusion

We have been using the workforce management solution deployed in Cloud for three years now and we can confidently say that we have made significant returns on our initial investment. In Cloud, we can ask for more operational capacity without the need to invest more capital. The system also alleviates the need for us to have our own support system; Kronos is a phone call away if we have issues. In these ways, Kronos workforce management has proven to be an invaluable tool for Aztec Shops to maximize the efficiency of our business operations.