Kronos Ditches Reports with Analytics Updates

November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

Kronos last week announced updates to its Workforce Analytics offering that should help customers make sense of large amounts of employee-related data stored in various Kronos applications. The company also used its annual KronosWorks user conference to tout big gains made in hosting its customers’ HR apps in the cloud.

With the Workforce Analytics update, there will be a big focus on using visualizations to allow managers to explore their employee-related data sets in a self-service manner. For example, managers can start out using heat-map visualizations and 2-D imaging to see broad-based data about overtime, absence, scheduling, and productivity data.

If the manager sees something interesting, he can drill down and view more fine-grained data that’s stored in various applications that are part of Kronos’ flagship iSeries Central and Workforce Central suites. Kronos, which OEMs technology from Microstrategy for Workforce Analytics, says the capability to use visual cues to analyze complex and high-volume workforce data “marks a giant leap forward from previous methods relying on data reports and charts.”

Heat maps in Workforce Analytics should help managers spot HR trends quickly.

The new offering includes 45 pre-built visualization options that incorporate internal data stored in Kronos systems, as well as external data. Workforce Analytics also uses a “guided discovery” process to help managers identify trends. The software uses industry-specific metrics and key performance indicators for healthcare, retail, manufacturing, the public sector, and logistics.

Kronos also unveiled a new tablet application for Workforce Analytics that allows users to access core functions and features of the suite while on the go. The company says the software works with Workforce Central, the company’s Windows-based HR suite. It’s unknown if it will work with iSeries Central, the company’s IBM i-based offering, which is used by thousands of Kronos customers, many of them big enterprises.

In other news, the Chelmsford, Massachusetts, software company announced that it now has 9,000 customers running in the cloud. That’s a 50 percent increase from a year ago, when it announced it had 6,000 Kronos Cloud customers at its KronosWorks show in Las Vegas.

Kronos offers two cloud solutions, including Workforce Ready, which is designed to provide basic time and attendance, payroll, and basic HR capabilities for small and midsize businesses; and a cloud-based version of Workforce Central for bigger companies.