Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Adoption of workforce analytics is increasing as organizations seek to recruit and retain employees more effectively and ensure that their people deliver the productivity they expect. According to our benchmark research on the topic, 89 percent of organizations want to make it simpler to provide workforce analytics, which is not surprising as our analysis shows that only 12 percent of organizations have reached the highest level of maturity here.

Maximizing cost-effectiveness and productivity is the goal of workforce analytics, and Kronos is focused on that. Kronos also provides workforce management applications, which I recently assessed. Now the company has released a new version of its workforce analytics software. In Kronos Workforce Analytics version 6.3  the technology is complete refreshed with the embedding of MicroStrategy, which is well-known for its robustness in business intelligence and analytics. (We recently assessed it also.) Kronos is smart to transition away from its previous Microsoft technology base, as Microsoft has not kept pace with innovations in business intelligence as well as MicroStrategy has. Kronos puts together analytics to help organizations measure and monitor employee activities such as time and attendance, absence, labor and related areas. The application provides a range of ad-hoc reporting and analysis and published dashboards. Users can perform data discovery by drilling down on charts, tables and reports, which are the most common components for presentation of labor-related analytics.

I had a chance to review the new release and found it easy to use the analytics to ascertain issues and opportunities to improve use of labor across the workforce. Kronos has improved integration of data for workforce analytics, which will help analysts spend less of their analytic process time on data-related tasks and more time on analysis; this is significant as our research shows that they spend two-thirds of the time preparing data. An easily accessible library of metrics and analytics reduces cumbersome setup for organizations that do not opt for prebuilt analytics.

Kronos has extended its core offering to industry-specific workforce analytics applications for healthcare, manufacturing and retail. These applications include prebuilt analytics that, for example, can help retailers quickly compare store labor to sales volume, or manufacturers check labor’s cost contribution to margin. To get organizations up and running quickly with the technology, Kronos provides a range of education and implementation services.

Kronos’s advancements are welcome, considering that almost half of organizations are not satisfied with their current workforce analytic processes, which should not be surprising as about two-thirds  use spreadsheets. This new release should appeal to organizations that are concerned about labor-specific analytics. Having workforce analytics in a secure, centralized place helps ensure that everyone is working from a consistent set of metrics. Our research shows that only 30 percent of organizations are satisfied with their existing analytics technology. As well as encouraging its existing customers to upgrade, Kronos also adds value for its suite of workforce management applications. I hope to see more support for mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets in future versions, especially considering they are already supported by MicroStrategy.

Workforce analytics is becoming a requirement for every organization that wants to maximize its investment in the workforce. If you have not seen a demonstration of Kronos’s latest release, now is the right time to do so.

Regards,

Mark Smith – CEO and Chief Research Officer