2012年11月10日星期六

Week 7


As our project goes deep, I gain more knowledge on workforce management.

Workforce management solutions can be deployed enterprise-wide. While special software is commonly used in numerous areas such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, the management of the workforce is often still handled by using spreadsheet programs or time recording. This often results in a waste of time and resources. By using a software solution for demand-oriented workforce management, planners can optimize staffing by creating schedules that meet actual requirement.

A key aspect of workforce management is scheduling. Current and future staffing requirements, short-term peak loads, availabilities, holidays, budget allowances, and skills have to be integrated into the planning process to guarantee optimal staff deployment. Employee scheduling software guarantees the best possible synthesis of optimized staff schedules and employee requests. Also, using workforce management systems, working times are booked exactly to the required time accounts and made available for payroll accounting by means of automated processes.

Through our researches on current market of workforce management software, I incline to recommend our clients to buy the scheduling module of KRONOS, Not only because the system they are using now is KRONOS, but also KRONOS is experienced in scheduling technology. I read the case of home furnishing retailer IKEA deploying KRONOS system across all IKEA stores in the UK. The application can automatically analyses historical trading data, projected sales figures, labor standards and employee availability to create the optimum staffing schedule for each department. Staff availability and shift preferences can be input directly into KRONOS, and then the system will not only give the right number of staff over the week, but also ensure that staffs are always in the right place at the right time to match the unique trading patterns of each store. KRONOS also allows remote access to store operations information. Under- or overstaffing can be spotted immediately where the optimized schedule has not been followed to the letter, and the manager can take remedial action immediately. 

We analyzed the requirements of our clients, including:
1.         The system should allow rostering staff to update the information of nurses, including name, type and working hour.
2.         The system should be accessible over the web by all the nurses and rostering staff at disability & accommodation services apartment.
3.         The system must allow nurses to fill in their roster request for next period.
4.         The system should allow all units to fill in their staffing configuration for next period.
5.         The system should automatically generate the roster schedule based on required staffing configuration for every unit and collected roster request from nurses.
6.         The system should be responsible for recording the starting time and leaving time of each nurse.
7.         The system should provide managers the authority to sign off nurses attendance.
8.         The system should automatically send the vacancies to BCU and update the schedule after the BCU have filled the vacancy.
9.         The system should send the recorded shift of every nurse to CHRIS to get their salary calculated and everyone paid
10.     The system should be easy to use, intuitive, and employ a graphical user interface

We can find little gap between what the KRONOS has done for IKEA and what our clients need. Comparing with buying a completely new system or customizing a system that is not familiar to clients, a new module of KRONOS can talk to current system well and save the training trouble.

Reference:

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