Viraj Continues to Navigate a Future of Reduced Payroll Leakages, and Increased Profitability and Productivity with Kronos Workforce Central
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Viraj is a global player in the stainless steel industry. Today, Viraj is one of the largest producers of stainless steel flanges in the world. Viraj is a fully integrated producer. From the melt shop to the logistics company, all steps of production are in-house. This strong backward integration ensures economies of scale, and these benefits are passed on to its global clients. Located in Tarapur, Mumbai, Viraj has 17 plants in India, with more than 7,000 employees.
In the past 15 years, the company has grown in size and product ranges, keeping in mind its customer-centric approach, timely delivery, and quality products. With more than 7,000 employees and because the time-to-pay process being almost completely manual, productivity and controlling cost are no easy tasks. The Kronos® Workforce Central® suite has helped Viraj eliminate payroll leakages and attain these aggressive goals.
Viraj decided to go in for a comprehensive workforce management solution and chose Kronos as its workforce management provider for its time and attendance solution. By teaming up with Kronos, Viraj wanted a completely automated time and attendance system that would eliminate any manual dependencies in the whole time-to-pay process, and hence eliminate any scope of abuse. As part of its complete automation drive, Viraj also was implementing SAP HR and Payroll. It was critical for the new time and attendance system to be integrated with the proposed SAP system.
The integrated suite reduced costs and proved to be a wise choice by eliminating manual processing and leaks caused, improving discipline, streamlining the time-to-pay process, and achieving control and visibility in the organisation.
Automating critical processes with Workforce Central
As Viraj searched for a vendor, it had clear evaluation criteria. The company wanted a vendor that not only could automate the entire time-to-pay process, but also could ensure that management had greater control and visibility of the workforce. Viraj also wanted a solution that was Web-based and could be deployed and managed centrally. After looking at many vendors, Viraj found that Kronos was the only vendor to meet and exceed its criteria.
Workforce productivity reaches new heights with the help of Workforce Central
With the Kronos Workforce Central solution, Viraj has achieved the benefits it had hoped for. Payroll costs have been reduced due to accuracy of the information. The availability of real-time information has helped managers make better decisions. The time and effort required to process monthly payroll and contractor payments have been reduced dramatically due to automated calculation and self-service.
Being a Web-based system, Kronos has met the requirements of being easily maintained and supported from a centralised location. The IT department now provides technical support from one location, so the costs related to assisting staff are minimal.
Kronos solution helps in addressing immediate need — payroll leakages
The deployment time for Kronos Workforce Timekeeper along with the Kronos 4500 Touch ID™ terminals was of paramount importance to Viraj.
The implementation of the solution at Viraj was staged to address the immediate priorities first. The deployment of the terminals at all the locations, capturing data centrally, processing the same, and passing it into payroll for eventual payment was implemented first. This not only eliminated the issues related to buddy punching, but also automated the time-to-pay process. Kronos standard reports were used by users to understand who was on premises, various time-related exceptions, etc.
Employee satisfaction increased with self-service
By deploying self-service to employees who do not have PCs and the easy-to-use interface, such as an ATM kiosk, brought about a very positive response from Viraj's workforce. Employees, apart from using the self-service kiosks (terminals) for attendance, had the ease of knowing the attendance status, schedules, etc., from the production bay. Such availability of information to employees, which earlier only was available at the time office, empowered employees and eliminated productivity loss.
Superior service completes the Kronos solution for Viraj
Extending Kronos with Kronos terminals in all Viraj’s canteens to monitor food taken by employees against the amount of food used has proven that Kronos solutions can help in controlling waste in all areas. By requiring employees to punch the lunch option on the terminals, the need to generate and distribute physical lunch coupons at the beginning of each month has been eliminated. Also, the reconciliation issues at the end of each month have been eliminated, as the Kronos solution easily can generate a report on the number of lunches taken.
With continued improvements in productivity, profitability, and reduced costs through streamlined processes and centralised data, employees are happier. Viraj has achieved maximum benefits from a Kronos solution that has allowed then to eliminate their manual time system, sufficiently control information, provide real-time visibility, and control payroll costs.
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