Kronos Expands Further into Gaming with TimeWorks, Compu-Cash Acquisitions

Published: January 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Einstein didn't prove that time is money, but if he had been working on Wall Street instead of a patent office in Berlin, he might have. Perhaps no software vendor understands that time is money better than Kronos, which practically owns the market for time-keeping and related employee management software. Last week, Kronos extended its control over the market by making two more acquisitions, this time relating to workforce management in the gaming industry.

Kronos is a publicly traded company that is headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and has over 2,900 employees. It was founded in 1977 and has grown both organically and through acquisitions to reach $519 million in sales during its fiscal 2005 year. The company's two latest acquisitions will bolster its position in the timekeeping and workforce management even further. Kronos paid an unspecified amount of cash to acquire TimeWorks , a competitor with a niche specialization in time and labor software for the gaming industry--software that runs on the iSeries. The software is used by some of the biggest casinos in the world and is also popular among tribal and smaller independently owned casinos. Kronos has an iSeries workforce management solution, called Kronos iSeries Central, which was just upgraded two weeks ago, and has invested heavily in biometric and scheduling technologies, which were not available in the TimeWorks solution.

Kronos also announced that it has acquired assets from Compu-Cash Systems, a former Kronos distributor in Arizona and southern Nevada, that allows it to sell directly to customers in these regions. Compu-Cash is a privately held, and the details of the transaction were not divulged. Kronos wanted to expand its direct sales force, which is why it wanted to take over the region controlled by Compu-Cash. Why Compu-Cash let go of it, Kronos did not say.