Sunrise Senior Living

Sunrise Senior Living simplifies staff scheduling with Kronos

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About Sunrise

Sunrise Senior Living provides senior citizens with a full range of personalised care, independent and assisted living services, with specialist neighbourhoods dedicated to residents suffering from memory impairment. In the UK, Sunrise currently has 27 open communities with a further three communities scheduled to open by the end of 2009. Sunrise has 2,500 employees in the UK and plans to increase this growth steadily each year for the foreseeable future.

Kronos at Sunrise

For a number of years Sunrise Senior Living has used Kronos Workforce Central^® to manage the time and attendance of its employees and in 2007 Kronos was appointed by the Group as a strategic business partner to help improve business efficiencies in direct relation to effective labour management. "The Kronos system is now an essential part of the Group's labour control suite of systems. We consider it to be our central labour management system which integrates with the company's HR, payroll, business intelligence and budgeting applications," says Alf Pomells, Sunrise's UK Kronos Consultant. He continues: "Recognising the strategic importance of the system, we appointed a Kronos representative onto the Sunrise Labour Management Steering Group in 2007 to ensure that our operational goals were supported through a more formal working partnership with Kronos."

Redefining operational business goals

During 2007 the Sunrise team also re-defined the key operational business goals they expected Kronos to deliver. These included improving cost efficiencies specifically around sickness, holidays, payroll accuracy and scheduling, as well as reducing the need to employ external agency staff, improving the automation and collection of working time information and improving the management of all workforce-related processes. "Kronos successfully met all of the objectives we set out to achieve, delivering tangible business benefits to the Community Executive Directors and the senior team," says Pomells.

Regulation compliance

Within the UK, care homes are governed tightly by statutory regulation on the delivery of care. As a result, staff scheduling is a complex process which can take managers away from their core responsibility of effectively managing the needs of the residents. Kronos now allows managers to easily comply with regulations set out by organisations such as Commission for Social Care & Inspection (CSCI) and ensure compliance with the Criminal Records Bureau and the Protection of Vulnerable Adults scheme by logging employee details where appropriate and generating real-time business reports.

Reduction in the number of unpaid working hours

Kronos automates the monitoring of employees’ working hours and will report, on an exception-only basis, where employees have worked in excess of their rostered hours. Pomells explains: "We need to ensure that our employees enjoy a good work/life balance by working only the hours for which they are paid. The Kronos system
highlights in real-time where employees are working longer hours and enables us to quickly address this with staff. By closely monitoring this area we have managed to reduce the level of unpaid hours worked by staff by 84%."

Effective management of sickness, absence and holidays

Using Kronos to record the exact reason for each case of sickness or absence means that Sunrise is now able to easily identify specific causes of absence. As a result, the Group now has monitoring and management procedures in place to promote continuous improvement in this area. Results so far have been extremely encouraging with sickness and absence levels reduced to 1.27% - a 20% reduction year on year worth over £84,000.

"A reduction in sickness and other absence not only improves our bottom line through reduced agency usage, but more importantly, means that our residents are being cared for by the team members they know and who have been trained to deliver care to the high standards that Sunrise residents expect," says Pomells.

Using Kronos to develop more effective solutions for managing holiday balances and to create more accurate schedules has resulted in less dependence on agency staff, the avoidance of holiday pay over-payments and a reduction in the number of employees losing untaken holidays at the end of the year. These efficiency improvements have resulted in an annual saving of £65,000.

Visibility of holiday entitlement is also much improved using Kronos. Sunrise can now see at a glance where holidays have been taken and where holiday entitlement is still to be used. This visibility enables the company to proactively manage and avoid a situation where employees all rush to use up leave at the end of the year, leaving the company short staffed and relying on agency employees.

Improving staff turnover & payroll accuracy

Reduced staff turnover is a key objective of the Sunrise Labour Management Team. To increase payroll accuracy, team members are given direct access to self-service terminals (Smart View) so they can alert payroll to any possible pay discrepancies before they are paid. Smart View also gives staff the opportunity to monitor their own rosters, view absence data, training and communication materials at their convenience. Pomells says: "Increased payroll accuracy, improvements in rostering and offering employees the opportunity to view, monitor and manage their own timesheets and holiday entitlement are just some of the benefits we’ve seen as a result of using Kronos."

The future

The current Kronos project is part one of a two part programme for Sunrise Senior Living in the UK. During 2009
Sunrise plans to implement the Kronos Workforce Scheduler module to further support its business strategies. With Scheduler, Sunrise plans to identify specific times where shift coverage could be an issue, especially where it could conflict with legislative requirements. Kronos will provide up to the minute records showing the exact number of employees on duty at given times, provide complete visibility to the exact number of employees available for duty and their experience, qualifications and skill set. Employee scheduling will be much more sophisticated, with the focus on relevant experience and skills, which will further enhance the level of care received by residents.