Ronseal
Ronseal discovers the benefits of a proven time and attendance system
Ronseal is a wholly owned subsidiary of the international paint manufacturer, the Sherwin Williams Company, based in Ohio. With a UK base in Sheffield, the company employs around 300 staff and supports its warehousing and distribution function by using a third party.
Project objectives
"The primary objective of the project was the improvement in data capture and accuracy of all employee attendance and activity information to assist us in generating improved efficiencies," explained Lisa Brammer, Senior Support Analyst at Ronseal. "Our existing systems were spreadsheet based and time consuming to administrate. It was definitely time to move on."
Business challenges
Manual data capture was creating problems for Ronseal in a number of business areas. Health and Safety roll call in the event of a site evacuation was difficult to manage quickly and efficiently as staff would verbally log their attendance with either the security gatehouse or their line manager and paper-based attendance logs were provided in the event of a roll call; the process of collecting employee attendance information for payroll purposes involved the manual completion of spreadsheet based timesheets.
"Kronos had the best fit for our needs – not only did they have a proven time and attendance system, they also fully understood our shop floor data collection requirements and came highly recommended by our payroll supplier." Lisa Brammer, Senior Support Analyst, Ronseal The timesheets included all attendance, holiday, training and overtime information and Ronseal experienced a level of 10% inaccuracy on all timesheets submitted. Timesheets were re-keyed into the payroll system, duplicating information already keyed and providing more scope for error. Finally, the system for collecting shop floor labour data and producing KPI's was a time consuming, manual process and with no set standards, each department would collect the data in a different way.
The solution
Business benefits – Phase One: Health and Safety
Compliance with Heath and Safety regulations The Health and Safety phase of the project involved the introduction of the Kronos system to record daily attendance, with employees clocking in and out of shifts at electronic clocking terminals placed at key entry and exit points. Ronseal can now rely completely on the Kronos system to provide accurate, real-time information as to which staff are present on site. With no reliance on verbal attendance registers and manual systems, Ronseal can be certain that all employees will be accounted for in the event of a site evacuation, therefore conforming to Health and Safety legislation.
Business benefits – Phase Two: Payroll administration
The Payroll phase of the project was to extend the data collection to include employee details required for payroll processing – overtime, holidays, shift information and sickness.
Accurate and timely payroll
Data now passes seamlessly from the Kronos data collection terminals to the supervisors' desktops, where exceptions are checked and the data signed off electronically before being passed through an interface into the Rutherford Webb payroll system. Payroll accuracy has improved, with the reduction in accidental keying errors, and payroll preparation is taking a fraction of the time. Lisa Brammer commented, "We estimate that we are saving 10 hours each week in payroll preparation time, with a reduction in time spent re-keying attendance data and inputting data into payroll."
Exception only reporting
Responsibility for time and attendance collection has moved away from the employee supervisor, who now only deals with exceptions. Supervisors no longer prepare attendance data for payroll as they now work to the exception generated by Kronos.
Staff trained to Kronos standards
Ronseal has invested in a full Kronos training programme for two members of staff, who on completion of the programme became Kronos Helpdesk certified. Lisa Brammer commented on the decision, "We now have two internal Kronos experts who can sort out the majority of the Kronos queries themselves, which reduces our maintenance bills and speeds up our internal support to customers."
More efficient staff scheduling
Ronseal employees work a number of shift patterns over the week and input all schedules into the Kronos system.
The Kronos system reports on any hours worked under or over the scheduled hours and provides an exception report for supervisors to approve before any payroll adjustments are made. The automation of this process has reduced the need to manually check all worked hours against each employee work schedule, saving time and improving accuracy.
Business benefits – Phase Three: Shop Floor Data Capture
The major aim of this part of the project was to capture individual tasks and the time spent on these tasks in order to accurately track the labour cost associated with each product produced. This provides Ronseal with accurate labour costs for future product costing.
Ronseal extracts the labour data from the Kronos system and merges it with the manufacturing system data to create labour cost reports for each product.
Monitoring line downtime and engineer response times
All 20 production lines at Ronseal are using Kronos to record the amount of time taken to complete each Works Order, and the amount of line downtime each day. Works Orders are automatically downloaded into Kronos from the manufacturing management system. The production line team also records via Kronos when an engineer has been called to attend to a maintenance issue, and how long it has taken the engineer to respond.
Labour cost reporting
As the third phase of the project progressed, Ronseal could extract the labour data from the Kronos system and merge it with the manufacturing system data to create labour cost reports for each product.
Ronseal benefits from improved management reporting, enhanced production line efficiencies, greater accuracy monitoring for Lean manufacturing improvements where man hours are involved, and direct bottom line savings.