Partner Solution Case Study
/ / Workforce Management Solution Provider Improves Sales and Time to Market with OBA
Overview
Country or Region:North America, Worldwide
Industry:Software - Workforce Management Solutions
Partner Profile
Kronos Incorporated ( based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, markets workforce management software solutions. Its flagship product, Workforce Central, incorporates a number of Office Business Application components.
Business Situation
Kronos customers demanded a more dynamic alternative to the static, hard-coded reporting options that Kronos provided.
Solution
Kronos created an Office Business Application, Workforce Worksheet, which uses the rich reporting capabilities of Microsoft Office Excel 2007® for workforce performance reporting.
Benefits
Enhance sales
Grow market
Cut product development cost
Speed time-to-market / “Our current customers already love our solution, but we can offer them more with our OBA component.”
Marc Cajolet, Director User Experience, Kronos Incorporated
Kronos® Incorporated, the leading workforce management solution provider, required a better way to provide its customers with rich but inexpensive reporting and analytics capabilities. Kronos found increasing customer demand for easy access to flexible reporting that static reports couldn’t provide without extensive modification.Yet these custom reports were difficult to develop and modify. Kronos included an Office Business Application (OBA) component built within Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 with the latest release of its flagship offering, Workforce Central® 6.1. This OBA, called Workforce Worksheet™, provides ready access to the wealth of high-quality workforce performance data within Workforce Central, and enables Kronos customers to relate workforce performance with other critical business performance data. By adopting an OBA product development strategy, Kronos was able to increase customer interest in its products, leading to additional sales, and reduce product development effort.
Situation
For more than three decades, Kronos Incorporated, based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, has delivered workforce management software solutions. These software solutions automate employee-centric processes, such as payroll and absence management, as well as workforce optimization processes, such as labor analytics and resource leveling across projects or work sites. The company has become the market leader in workforce management solutions, and the company’s products enjoy an install base of 30 million worldwide and a presence in more than half of the Fortune 1000® companies.
In the early 2000s, Kronos expanded the business value of its flagship product, Workforce Central, by developing Web-based data collection and reporting solutions for the product. These solutions enabled global organizations to easily collect workforce data from distributed work sites around the world, store the data centrally, and distribute the data as needed to every corner of the organization. Prior to the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007®, Kronos began integrating SharePoint technologies within Workforce Central. Kronos developers used SharePoint Server and SharePoint Web parts to build an enhanced user interface for Workforce Central that streamlined common tasks and boosted worker productivity. Kronos also used SharePoint technologies to embed automated process management capabilities within Workforce Central that reduce manual tasks for human resources managers and allow them to focus on workforce analysis and optimization.
While these features greatly enhanced the business value of Workforce Central, Kronos recognized an opportunity to improve the reporting capabilities of the product. Kronos provided a comprehensive portfolio of standard, predefined reports. But like many providers of enterprise solutions, Kronos had to address customers’ unique needs though custom reports—either developed by Kronos or by the customer’s in-house resources. Depending on the complexity of the reporting requirements, these custom reports could require a considerable development investment. Moreover, because these custom reports were often built using static code, modifying reports or integrating additional data from other enterprise systems was cumbersome and time-consuming.
Kronos began investigating alternative reporting methods in order to maximize the benefit of Workforce Central to its customers.
Solution
In 2007, Kronos product developers participated in an Office Business Application (OBA) briefing session with a Microsoft development partner to investigate how an OBA product development strategy could align with Kronos’ product development goals. Over the course of two days, the participants brainstormed about which OBA components could most enhance Kronos products, and the discussion quickly turned to improving the reporting capabilities of Workforce Central. According to Marc Cajolet, User Experience Director at Kronos: “The session ended with a particularly engaging discussion—we all huddled around a whiteboard and overnight we had an OBA strategy to extend Workforce Central data to Excel 2007 for reporting as an alternative to our traditional reporting methods.”
Over the next four weeks, Kronos software developers quickly turned those original whiteboard diagrams into a working proof of concept (POC). The POC proved that Workforce Central data could be quickly and easily transferred to Excel 2007 for analysis and detailed reporting. Once the data was in Excel 2007, workforce performance data could be related directly to other business performance data to provide important operational insights to managers across an organization. Most importantly, the Excel 2007 based reporting capabilities reduced the dependence on expensive software developers to create custom reports—the same rich reporting capabilities were incorporated directly into the familiar Excel 2007 interface.
Following a demonstration of the POC to product development managers, Kronos management decided to incorporate the POC, which was named Workforce Worksheet, into the upcoming release of Workforce Central as an alternative to traditional development.
Benefits
By pursuing an OBA strategy for product development, Kronos was able to realize a number of key benefits, including expanded business opportunities, the ability to better meet customer requirements, a reduction in product development, and greater marketing reach by leveraging Microsoft partner resources.
Expanding Business Opportunities
By including OBA components within its workforce management solution, Kronos was able deliver more value to its customers and drive net-new sales as a result. The value of Workforce Worksheet is easy to explain to potential customers. “A lot of theenhancements in the latest release of Workforce Central, version 6.1, are ‘under the hood’,” says Andrew West, Product Marketing Manager at Kronos. “There are some valuable additions—but these enhancements are not immediately visible to customers. Workforce Worksheet, on the other hand, is right on the desktop—it’s a component that is highly visible across an organization and it’s something that our customers appreciate immediately.”
As the company’s current customer base has become more sophisticated IT consumers, Kronos has kept pace by offering more sophisticated IT solutions. “More and more, our customers want to actually use all of the data they collect—they want to be able to visualize their performance data and make more informed decisions” says Cajolet. “They get really excited about the ability to quickly make sophisticated dashboards in Excel 2007 without relying on IT specialists. Our current customers already love our solution, but we can offer them more with our OBA component.”
Kronos is also reaching new customers in different market segments. “We’re getting a great deal of interest from new customers in Workforce Worksheet,” says Jon Handschke, Sales Engineer at Kronos. “In 75 percent of our presentations to new customers, Workforce Worksheet is a key attention grabber.”
Kronos also uses Workforce Worksheet for product demonstrations to potential customers as part of the presales effort. Often, these demonstrations are the key to adequately communicating the business value of Workforce Central to a potential customer. “We recently won some net-new business as a direct result of Workforce Worksheet,” recalls Handschke. “The customer gave us an example of a report they needed, and asked for a rough order of magnitude for what it would take to build the report using our solution. We used Workforce Worksheet to build the actual report for the customer, and we turned it around in a day. The Workforce Worksheet OBA solution has made our sales force much more adaptable.”
Better Meeting Customer Requirements
As labor costs come under closer scrutiny in the current economic downturn, many organizations are extending their workforce management solutions beyond managing employee time and attendance, HR and payroll processes, and hiring. These organizations want to draw meaningful conclusions about operational efficiency by comparing workforce performance data with other business data. Kronos found that Excel 2007 provides an excellent environment to pool data from multiple sources. The Kronos reporting solution provides important business insight that improves operational decision making for an organization. The embedded Microsoft reporting engine, SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) and the close integration with Excel 2007 make it possible for organizations to transform workforce data directly into actionable business intelligence. “With Workforce Worksheet, managers can relate workforce performance data, like the average time it takes for a worker to complete a task, directly with other business data, like the number of sales over a period,” says Handschke. “This insight—how workforce performance affects business performance—is critical in improving business efficiency.”
The Kronos OBA solution also reduces reporting costs. Workforce Worksheet, in conjunction with the other SharePoint Server 2007 interfaces available in Workforce Central, allows organizations to avoid costs associated with custom report development while still providing all of the benefits associated with rich reporting and data visualization. “With Workforce Worksheet, customers can create sophisticated reports that pull data from multiple sources and refresh automatically. These reports contain detailed charts and visualizations, and are easily transferrable to SharePoint Server through SharePoint Web parts for distribution across an organization,” says Cajolet. “To do something similar without Workforce Worksheet would require a considerable investment in report development and a Web-based reporting infrastructure.”
Leveraging the Microsoft R&D Effort
Kronos has heavily leveraged Microsoft technologies in the past. The current release of Workforce Central is built using Microsoft
SQL Server 2008®, SharePoint Server 2007, and 2007 Office system components. By adopting an OBA product development strategy, Kronos was able to considerably reduce the cost and cycle time to develop Workforce Worksheet.
Kronos developers used premade components of the 2007 Office system in their solution and benefited from the rich 2007 Office system APIs, integration points, and documentation. “We didn’t need to do a deep dive in order to investigate how the OBA components worked,” says Cajolet. “All of the OBA components were right on the surface for us to begin integrating and building into our solution.”
The Kronos OBA strategy also considerably reduced project risk. “We were able to quickly determine what functionality and which OBA components would deliver the best return on investment,” says Cajolet. “We didn’t build any demo-ware. Everything we built during the initial development was real and used real data. At each step in the development of Workforce Worksheet, we clearly understood the development costs required and the functionality that was feasible. This foresight would not have been possible without using Microsoft Office system components.”
By leveraging existing Microsoft R&D, Kronos was able to save a considerable amount of time and cost during the development of Workforce Worksheet. “The development team brought Workforce Central from POC to product in about 12 weeks and consumed 67 person-weeks in development labor, a phenomenal achievement,” says Cajolet. “From the standpoint of development time and cost, this was considered a small effort internally, but one that had a large impact.”
Leveraging the Microsoft Partner Program
Microsoft and Kronos have enjoyed a fruitful partnership for more than a decade. Kronos participates in the Microsoft Partner Program, which provides the company with important information about Microsoft product
development strategies and roadmaps. Kronos also influences those roadmaps by providing valuable insight to Microsoft.
According to Cajolet, “the real success of this partnership is the combination of Microsoft support and the readiness of the technology.”
Microsoft Office System
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