PFD goes from manual to automated with Kronos

As Australia’s largest privately owned food services distribution organisation, PFD Food Services prides itself on service and reliability. The company recognises that its employees are its most important asset and so enables its workforce with critical IT capabilities that it believes will ultimately help better serve its customer base.

PFD started using Kronos workforce management solutions deployed in the Kronos Cloud to streamline its business and deliver operational efficiencies. PFD has deployed the Kronos time and attendance application which gives managers access to real-time insights into the company’s workforce, allowing them to identify labour trends, manage staff and make more accurate forecasts.

“We have a very dynamic workforce with a diverse mix of people across our sites. This means we are working with complex pay structures, which expose us to the risk of delivering incorrect payments to staff, causing dissatisfaction that could impact the way staff work in our business,” said Richard Cohen, chief information officer at PFD.

“We realised we needed a centralised, automated system that would streamline the time management capture process and tightly integrate with our payroll solution. Kronos ticked all the boxes. It was easy to implement, manage and use. It delivers all the benefits we were looking for.”

PFD says that since implementing Kronos, it has seen significant improvements in the integrity of the information flowing through the business. It is now able to report faster and more accurately on its labour. Previously manual timesheets, data entry and payroll approvals are now all automated, reducing the resource burden across the organisation and reducing the need for paper timesheets.

“We have seen a 68% decrease in payroll enquiries and 84% reduction in ‘outside-of-cycle’ pays. The efficiency of the Kronos solution has also meant that when employee numbers grow through acquisition, our payroll team can scale without needing additional headcount as well as being able to support ongoing and new transformational IT projects,” Cohen said.

“As the host of the solution, Kronos works closely with us every step of the way. With Kronos, we know we can access the solution anywhere within our environment and also externally if we need to. We also don’t need to carry the overhead for hardware and on-site resources that we would have needed to support the application internally. This amounts to an estimated 50% savings as opposed to us managing the application ourselves.

“Turning to cloud was a decision that made sense for us as a business as it is a viable tool at our disposal.”