G4S Case Study
G4S Care & Justice Services (UK) is a pioneering provider of critical services and employs almost 8,000 people to deliver a wide range of services to central and local governments and their agencies, regulatory bodies, UK police forces and the private sector. A division of G4S plc, the international security solutions group, the organisation manages four UK prisons, three secure training centres and three immigration centres. Over 750,000 prisoners/detainees are escorted every year and Care & Justice Services secures over 300 police and court custody suites.
G4S uses Kronos within G4S Care & Justice Services to manage timekeeping and rostering for approximately 4,500 employees within three prisons, an immigration centre and 149 UK court locations.
A challenging environment
In any 24/7 operation, managing a large workforce across multiple sites presents a number of challenges. Within G4S Care & Justice Services, understaffing may result in failing to meet contractual obligations, therefore it’s imperative that the employee scheduling system can support a flexible working environment where employees can be called away or replaced at short notice, and at any time of the day or night, 365 days a year.
Time for change
Prior to implementing Kronos, there were a number of different systems in use for time keeping and rostering, including manual spreadsheets and bespoke systems that were reaching the end of their life cycle. There were a number of different working practices and a large volume of challenging pay rules across the group; in addition there was no provision for the automated capture of hours worked which resulted in manual capture of data and manual input into payroll. Employee rostering was mostly a manual, spreadsheet-based process, which was difficult and time consuming to manage efficiently.
Lisa Rouse Head of HR – Operations Support, G4S Care & Justice Services explains, “A review of our existing solutions confirmed to us that we needed a standard platform for all employee contracts and greater visibility into workforce availability and working hours. In Kronos we now have a long-term solution with the flexibility to grow and change along with our business requirements. Selecting Kronos also ensures that we have strong development and support along with the ability for self management or purchased services as required.”
Kronos in Prison Servics
Kronos had been implemented into three prisons by the end of 2009. These prisons have been managed by G4S for several years, where working practices and methods have grown around each location over the years. As such, each had a very specific business case for moving to an automated workforce management system. The design and regime differences between the locations has lead to very specific solution delivery through the Kronos system.
Kronos in Court Services
Kronos is also implemented across 140 UK courts managed by G4S, in a project that took just three months to roll out. Court Services use either Kronos® 4500 Touch ID™ terminals or Teletime® - Kronos’ telephone time entry solution for recording working hours; all staff rosters are held in Kronos. Lisa Rouse explains, “We had a new pay agreement about to take effect and an existing time management system that was incapable of managing our company absence policy. With a fixed deadline approaching we successfully rolled out Kronos to all courts within a very short timescale.”
Business Benefits
Gaining greater visibility to working hours
G4S has seen a number of benefits since using Kronos, particularly in the area of gaining greater visibility to the workforce across the prisons and courts. Lisa Rouse comments, “We were very clear from the outset that Kronos would not completely change the way in which our employees worked – we’d continue to be sensitive to location-specific working practices and would use Kronos to enable us to more efficiently manage and automate the way in which we currently work. We now have a standard approach to collecting working time data, real-time visibility as to who is at work across all locations, and our employees have fully embraced a much simpler process for recording time and getting paid accurately and ontime.”
Closer scrutiny of hours worked leads to cost savings
The paper-based time recording had, over time, lead to some inaccuracies in the amount of overtime payments made to some employees. Rounding up of hours on paper-based timesheets was leading to overtime overpayments – something that had gone un-noticed prior to Kronos. Lisa Rouse explains, “Once Kronos was installed it was good practice to run two payrolls in tandem to check the accuracy of the data we were collecting in the Kronos system. We noticed immediately that Kronos was accurately recording only the exact hours worked, yet with our manual system, rounding errors on paper-based timesheets meant that overtime was being regularly over-claimed in some areas, resulting in approximately £12k of over-claimed overtime in one month, which could result in as much as £144k per annum. The correct application of rounding rules using Kronos has resulted in a reduction in the payment of additional hours of approximately £63K per annum and a significant bottom-line saving.”
Efficient rostering enables fast decision making
Rostering employees working in prisons and courts creates a number of challenges, with rosters carefully aligned to workload in order to keep labour costs to a minimum, but flexible enough to allow changes at short notice. Working with Kronos, G4S now creates rosters for a rolling period. Kronos alerts a line manager the moment an employee fails to arrive for a shift, enabling them to quickly call in an employee from a rest day or to reassign a flexible employee to cover the absence. Lisa Rouse explains, “With our previous manual system it was impossible to see at a glance who was at work, who was expected and who was running late. We now have immediate, real-time data from Kronos which allows us to make fast, informed decisions about staffing – essential in an environment where there are stiff penalties for understaffing and not meeting contractual obligations.”
Less paper, reduced admin, fewer queries
The elimination of labour intensive manual processes such as manually recording and faxing timesheets and manually keying the data into payroll, has significantly reduced paperwork and time spent chasing paperwork at G4S. Furthermore, the ability to now automate all payment rules based on planned rosters and actual clocking times has been critical to paying employees correctly, which has been measured by the significant reduction in pay queries received. Lisa Rouse comments,”It’s our overarching aim to move towards paperless information systems for managers and employees, and we’ve moved closer to achieving this with the introduction of Kronos. We have a ‘one touch’ solution where information is captured just once in the most appropriate system (Kronos or HR system) and shared with other departments to ensure that correct information is available at all times throughout the business.”
System self sufficiency
The ownership of the Kronos system is within the Human Resource Business Systems (HRBS) team at G4S who were clear from the outset that they would develop the skills required to maintain and configure Kronos. Lisa Rouse explains, ”We’ve invested in training supplied by Kronos to ensure that we’re now able to implement and change the system configuration ourselves to meet our changing business requirements. The system is highly configurable and we’re delighted that we’re able to be self sufficient on a day to day basis whilst still having a technical support team at Kronos to help us with new projects and technical queries.”
Continued investment
The organisation continues to invest in Kronos, with self-scheduling, employee self-service in selected locations, and the Workforce Attendance module due for implementation in 2010.
Concluding, Lisa Rouse comments, “We are light years away from where we were before the Kronos project started. We now have complete visibility to all employee attendance, working hours and lateness across every location, with all information available in one system and accessible across the organisation. The real-time availability of the information ensures that we can take fast action to replace absent employees and Kronos provides up to the minute information on staff costs, projected overtime costs and understaffing issues. Kronos is a business critical system for us here at G4S and we’ll continue to invest in additional functionality to ensure that we support the business with a flexible, transparent and efficient solution for workforce management.”