ASIG
ASIG save on payroll and improve efficiency with Kronos
About ASIG
ASIG (Aircraft Service International Group) is a leader in the commercial aviation services industry, offering a full range of ground handling, fuelling, cargo and ancillary services in 60 cities throughout North America, Europe and Asia.
ASIG's largest operation is based at Heathrow Airport, providing aircraft fuelling services for Heathrow and other UK airports. In December 2004 ASIG acquired aircraft cleaning company Boker Aeroclean. The Group has 900 employees at ten locations across the UK, servicing approximately 7500 flights per week.
The business challenge
Following the acquisition of Boker Aeroclean by ASIG in 2004, the company had the task of manually processing an additional 550 Boker manual clock cards each week, for full and part time staff. Given the manual nature of this process, it was prone to error and proved a difficult task to manage for the ASIG payroll team – requiring two people two full days to complete.
The automated nature of the Kronos system means that there is now no margin for error, with the system recording the exact minute that an employee starts and finishes work.
Management required more visibility to employee information
As a result of the Boker acquisition, senior management required greater visibility to time and attendance figures, absenteeism and trends. This meant that a member of the payroll team would have to invest one day each week to analyse the data manually to produce the required detailed reports. ASIG regularly experienced payroll issues relating to annual leave and sickness. The company held manual records of staff holidays and absence and any queries would require the payroll team to search through clock cards and paper-based attendance records.
The Solution
Following a thorough investigation of the marketplace, Kronos was selected from a shortlist of three companies. ASIG purchased Kronos Workforce Central® with biometric finger scanners. Liz Copus, ASIG’s Grooming Payroll Manager said "It was imperative for us to select a company that we trusted implicitly to make this work for us. We were impressed with the knowledge and expertise of the Kronos team and were completely confident that we had made the right decision before committing ourselves to the project."
Project methodology simplifies implementation
Kronos' Momentum Methodology helped ASIG overcome any concerns about the systems implementation. By breaking down the project into easy to understand phases of work, both Kronos and ASIG could agree on the deliverables from the previous phase before the team was ready to move on to the next one.
Commenting on the implementation phase, Anita Sidhu, Treasury and Payroll Manager said, "Kronos Momentum methodology guided us through the implementation process with a structure that we could all understand and all points were documented so that they could correct the issues. The Kronos team worked tirelessly to make sure we had absolutely everything covered off – they were so patient with us. Both teams worked really hard to make sure everything was watertight."
The benefits
ASIG was losing approximately £500 per week on weekly salaries. Previously, rounding hours up and down was often imprecise, leading to overpayment in some cases which could not be detected easily without spending time physically checking each worker's pay and going back through the payroll process again. The automated nature of the Kronos system means that there is now no margin for error, with the system recording the exact minute that an employee starts and finishes work, with no need for any manual intervention to calculate hours worked and process the payroll.
The time taken to process the payroll has been drastically reduced. Previously it took two members of staff two full days each week to complete, now it takes approximately six hours in total and because of the accuracy of the data now being processed, there are fewer payroll queries to deal with.
The process of administering the clock cards previously required an hour at the beginning and end of each day to manually sort them into order, depending on who was working on which crew, to allow managers/co-coordinators to note any absence, lateness or overtime. At the end of the day the cards would be processed and then put back into the crew order to begin the procedure again the next day. Kronos has completely eliminated this process, saving 17 hours each week.
Consistency of pay rules
The rules-based nature of the Kronos system has enabled ASIG to identify and eradicate any anomalies in staff pay rates that had crept into the system over time. The company now has universally accepted pay rules, resulting in streamlined processes, increased efficiency and reduced costs.
All 30 line managers now have access to the Kronos system which enables them to produce their own reports, follow up on enquiries, and spot any absenteeism patterns. With this responsibility transferred back to managers at the airport, the workload of the head office payroll team has been significantly reduced.
Kronos now provides an accurate central data repository for all employee attendance information which is crucial to support staff disciplinary issues, where working hours and absence were being called into question.
With a steady flow of new staff, many weekend and part-time workers and a huge airport site, keeping track of individual employees was difficult before Kronos, and ASIG had experienced cases of staff clocking in and out for each other. Using biometric data collection terminals means that employees must now be present at work in order to 'clock', therefore removing the likelihood of fraudulent clocking.
Weekly reports for senior management can now be produced in minutes, rather than the eight hours spent prior to using Kronos. Anita Sidhu commented: 'The Kronos system has brought ASIG cost savings – approximately 1% of our total payroll bill. It has given us a greater degree of control of our workforce, increased our operating efficiency and reduced the time taken to complete payroll from 32 hours to just eight hours. Within 12 months, Kronos will have paid for itself'.
The future
ASIG has quickly seen the value of Kronos in the Boker Aeroclean segment of the business. With phase one complete, ASIG began the second part of the implementation into the fuelling side of the business, covering an additional 300-400 employees.