Moores Furniture Group
Moores Furniture Group selects a Kronos system as part of its continuous improvement strategy
About Moores Furniture Group
Moores Furniture Group is a leading manufacturer and the market leader in the supply of quality kitchen and
bathroom furniture in the UK, to both public and private house building markets. Based on 30 acres at Thorp Arch, Wetherby, the company employs over 1,000 staff. The factory itself extends over 600,000 square feet.
Project benefits achieved by Moores Furniture Group
- Single data entry point significantly improves overall efficiencies
- Improved payroll efficiencies
- Bottom line benefits – elimination of manual administration tasks and other non-value-added activities
- Excellent management information – able to make better informed decisions
- Heath and Safety improvements – better visibility to who is on site
- Reduction in absence levels
- Real time availability of data speeds up decision making
- Supports drive for continuous improvement within the organisation
- Shop floor productivity gains.
“We found Kronos to be a highly professional vendor. They were responsive, honest and proactive at the tender stage and the project was delivered on time and to budget – confirming that we had made the right decision in selecting them”
Richard Tattersall, Operations Director at Moores Furniture Group
Project scope
As a lean manufacturer and as part of its drive for continuous improvement, Moores identified a number of inefficiencies with its staff timekeeping and payroll processes. They then set out to find a system to automate
these procedures. A decision was made to select Kronos and the system was shown to a wider audience at Moores. Richard Tattersall, Operations Director at Moores recalls seeing the system for the first time, "It was a real eye-opener. It was immediately obvious that Kronos was a lot more than a timekeeping system. It made me think about all the other employee processes we had, and how they could be linked together alongside Kronos."
The project specification was rewritten and Kronos was selected following a thorough vendor selection process.
Richard explained, "We found Kronos to be a highly professional vendor. They were responsive, honest and proactive at the tender stage and were given an excellent reference from Masco, our parent company in the US, for whom they are a preferred supplier. The project was delivered on time and to budget and confirmed that we had made the right decision in selecting Kronos"
Business challenges
Moores had identified that its staff timekeeping and payroll systems were trailing behind the standards required by such a world-class organisation with state of the art facilities at every other level of its business. Shop floor staff recorded their working time with manual punch cards; the payroll department would spend hours every week preparing payroll spreadsheets for sign-off; there were a number of "standalone" systems each holding their own employee information and the process for recording working hours and paying staff accurately each week had become time consuming and inefficient.
The solution
Kronos Workforce Central was selected by Moores and a number of interfaces have since been built into their existing systems for payroll, HR and absence management. All employees including Directors record their working time using swipe cards with photographic ID.
Business benefits
Improved payroll accuracy
Payroll accuracy has increased since the introduction of Kronos – data is now electronically transferred from the data collection points, checked for accuracy and transferred over a secure interface into the payroll system. By eliminating the manual transfer of data from the clock cards and then into the payroll system, possible errors have been reduced.
Single point of data entry
The underlying objective of the Kronos project was to arrive at a single point of data entry for employee-related information, such as timekeeping, payroll, holidays and absence. Moores uses a Lotus Notes system for recording departmental transfers, holidays, leavers and new starters, but once a transfer form, for example, had been electronically signed off, the request was printed out and re-keyed into the HR system, and then again into the
payroll system. This duplication of effort was an inefficient use of time and error prone. Lotus Notes is still used as the core system for recording various employee-related processes, but at the final stage in the process, the information is swept across electronically to automatically populate the Kronos system.
Kronos then seamlessly updates the HR system via another secure interface. "A key benefit of the project has been the integration of three standalone systems" said Richard Tattersall. "The result is that data is entered only once in one core system – Lotus Notes, HR or Kronos – and the other systems are updated automatically. It's more efficient, utilises the good systems we already had and has dramatically improved overall efficiency."
Bottom-line benefits
The web-based nature of the Kronos System means that information on employee working hours is delivered from the data collection units directly to the desktop – no need to decipher manual clock cards or to transfer this data onto spreadsheets. Sharon Tyson, the Kronos Project Manager at Moores explained, "We used to have people tied up for hours and days doing routine payroll admin work which is now all handled by Kronos. The efficiency improvements have resulted in being able to re-deploy members of staff into more value-added activities."
Real time information speeds decision making
It is essential in a manufacturing environment that production lines are up and running on time each morning and this relies completely on the availability of the correct number of staff to man each line. Absent staff means that work cannot start immediately and valuable production time is lost. Using Kronos, operations managers can see instantly from their desktop report who is available for work. Any absence is noted, available staff are easy to identify and production line transfers are dealt with swiftly to enable work to start. Moores estimate that even with absent staff to deal with, work can generally start within 10 minutes of the 8:00am start time. Before Kronos, on occasion it took some significant time each day to work out who was absent and to manage the staff transfers – resulting in a considerable amount of production downtime each week.
Reduction in absence levels
Absence monitoring is now significantly more accurate with Kronos. Absence data is collected in real-time and management reports are used to analyse trends and frequency of absence. The Bradford Factor has also been
introduced to provide further analysis. Moores believe that they have low absence rates compared with the manufacturing sector generally, and that absence has continued to reduce since the introduction of Kronos.
Future Developments
Moores are evaluating an upgrade to their system and as part of this they will be looking more closely at the Workforce Attendance module. This application will automate and streamline the administration and application of Moores absence policy.