Best-in-Class Workforce Management Software from Industry Experts
Header

Now that we’re into the month of December and the holiday season has kicked into full gear, here’s a question just about every manager probably has on their mind: Just how much work am I getting out of my employees this month, anyway?

Well, regardless of your religious affiliation the end-of-the-year holiday season impacts every workplace, and every worker, whether it’s retail, manufacturing, or healthcare. And, as someone who manages people, you probably only too well, that your employees will likely be distracted and stressed at this time of the year.

This article from Entrepreneur and Glassdoor titled 7 Ways to Manage Employee HolidayTime Off’ is a useful guide for any manager:

1. Plan in advance: Many industrial businesses have their holiday schedule planned well in advance, and there’s no reason any type of business can’t do that either. According to Brian Koniuk, a principal at the HackettGroup, manufacturers typically require employees to plan out their vacation for the coming year so they know in January who is working what holiday and who is off for the entire year. In other industries, like health care, Koniuk says schedules are made three to five months in advance.

 2. First come, first served: If you are running a business that is busy during the holidays or needs to be staffed 24/7 year-round, one way to prevent employees from taking off in large numbers is to limit the amount and give workers off on a first come, first served basis, says Pat Sweeney, human resource manager at Old Colony Hospice and Palliative Care. “If they know they are going to want to be off over the holidays they know they have to ask for the time off way in advance,” says Sweeney. She says that starting as early as September supervisors can notify the staff that requests for time off have to be made as soon as possible. Hand in hand with a first come, first served policy is capping the number of people that can take off during the holidays.

 3. Stagger the schedule: You may not be able to keep a full staff during the holidays, but that doesn’t mean you have to close early or provide a reduced level of service. To combat that, Kathy Harris, managing director of recruiting firm Harris Allied, says to stagger your employee vacation scheduling. For instance, you can have someone work in the morning during the holidays and another worker take the afternoon shift. Another option: have one employee work Monday and Tuesday and another Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The idea behind a staggered employee vacation schedule is to always have coverage, and at the same time, give employees time off during the holidays.

4. Keep a pool of part-timers: If you are operating a business that picks up during the holiday season, or you know a lot of your staff will be gone during that time, it’s a good idea to keep a pool of part-timers that you can tap when you need extra help, says Gary Should is, a small business consultant, coach and owner of a gymnastics center. “We have a pool of part-timers that we know can work the holidays,” says Should is. “Whenever we hit the holiday period or periods where we lose part of our staff they come on.” According to Should is, it’s a good idea to keep in contact with these part-timers year-round so you’ll know their availability ahead of time. Another option is to post a job in anticipation for holiday hiring.

5. Offer a holiday pay differential: For some people money talks even if it means they won’t be with their family during the holidays, which is why offering a holiday pay differential can keep your business staffed. According to Sweeney, it should be something that is part of the company’s structure and not something you offer just to entice an employee not to take off. “If you’re in a business you know there are a lot of requests for time off you can have some differential built in,” she says.

 6. Institute a vacation blackout period: For some businesses, particularly retail, the holidays are the busiest time for them, which means they need a full staff if not more. If your business falls into this category, a way to prevent employees from taking off is to have a blackout period where no one can take off, says Tanios. If an employee wants off during a blackout period he or she would need to ask well in advance, and it would be at the manager’s discretion, says Tanios. It’s a good idea to inform employees from the beginning of the blackout policy so they aren’t blindsided come holiday time.

 7. Let employees work at home: These days pretty much everybody has a laptop, iPad or smartphone that enables them to work remotely. If your staff doesn’t have to be on site, letting them work at home during the holidays can be a productive way to get things done without having to bring in additional staff. Working at home is a viable option only if the business lends itself to it and there’s away to ensure the employees are actually working. “In this day and age working from a virtual office anywhere is possible,” says Sweeney.

Bottom-line: During the holiday season, employees are likely dreaming of cozying up in Christmas sweaters with their egg-nogs or just dreading that visit from relatives that they see only once a year. Employees will be stressed out enough as it is, anything you can do as their manager to bring joy, could increase productivity and yes, profit to the bottom line.

Keep current with ATS:

The term “Lean” is well known in manufacturing circles and has been adopted across various disciplines including; Lean Healthcare and Lean Accounting to name a couple. A brief description of lean principles in Wikipedia states in part;

“Lean manufacturing or lean production, often simply “lean”, is a systematic method for the elimination of waste (“Muda”) within a manufacturing system. Lean also takes into account waste created through overburden (“Muri”) and waste created through unevenness in work loads (“Mura”). Working from the perspective of the client who consumes a product or service, “value” is any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.

Essentially, lean is centered on making obvious what adds value by reducing everything else. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as “lean” only in the 1990s. TPS is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world’s largest automaker, has focused attention on how it has achieved this success.”

Ye Shall Practice Lean Manufacturing

Today, several organizations have formal Continuous Improvement methods that leverage the “lean” process –but may leave others to chance or perhaps feel it’s not as important. ATS Cloud Workforce Management for Manufacturing was developed with lean thinking from its original inception and as such has many built-in capabilities to support your lean initiatives. “You can’t improve what you don’t track or measure.” This in and of itself is one of the tenets that have shaped the ATS Workforce Management for Manufacturing with a robust database, embedded with sophisticated user dashboards, and business analytics.

For example, users can extrapolate reports in real-time to measure payroll costs, through a set of forecasting tool and workflows–and compare key performance indicators (KPIs) against goals to clearly measure on-going improvements. Now, that’s taking the holistic approach to “Lean Manufacturing.”

To learn more about ATS Cloud Workforce Management for Lean Manufacturing go to our website and download a demonstration. And to reach us by phone, call: 866.294.2467.

Ye Shall Practice Lean Manufacturing

In order to quantify the benefits of a time and attendance solution, you first have to know what to look for. ATS time and attendance solution can help your company cut payroll costs and, at the same time, enhanced employee productivity.

Benefit of an ATS Time and Attendance Solution

If your company is using paper punch clocks or paper time sheets, and you are interested in automating the process, here are some key benefits you can expect after implementing an ATS Time and Attendance Solution:

Reduction in the use of paper and fraud

  • ATS time and attendance solution will reduce the cost associated with creating and distributing paper timesheets
  • No more transferring of time sheets from employee to supervisor for review and then onto payroll and HR department for processing.
  • Employees can fraudulently increase the number of hours they get paid for by having a coworker punch them when they are late or not at the work site.

Improved Data Quality

  • Through the use of ATS time clocks, Employees can find out how much overtime they have accumulated during the week, review schedules and request time-off.
  • Employee hours can be sent automatically to your payroll software with the click of a mouse.
  • By eliminating the administrative tasks of paper time sheets you improve workforce productivity, and your employees are now free to focus on more value-added activities.

Let’s face it, how many employees complain if they get overpaid? If a small fraction, of your workforce is consistently getting over paid, it will affect your company’s revenue. And, when employees get underpaid they will complain, thus, resulting in the company having to make adjustments, and that in and of itself is costly.

Employee pay is one of the biggest controllable expenses in most organizations. As an organization, you should have accurate information about; employee attendance, vacation eligibility, the ability to schedule accurately to meet customer demands, the number of projects your company completed in the last two months, and access to real-time analytics to help you make informed decisions. Manual time sheets will not help you with those objectives and will waste time and take a bite out of your profits. In an ever increasing global and competitive business landscape, wouldn’t it be better to identify and eradicate manual time and attendance bottlenecks?

So why go with ATS? Because our time and attendance solution is easy-to-use and they deliver, up-to-the-minute and high-quality information you need to make better decisions

To explore our solutions, you can download brochures; sign up for one of live product demonstrations. You can also reach us by phone at; 1.866.294.2467.

Benefit of an ATS Time and Attendance Solution

Let’s Talk About Cloud Baby

June 16th, 2015 | Posted by Apex Time Solutions in Benefit Accruals | Cloud Based Time Management Solution | Forecasting | Labour Forecasting | Payroll - (Comments Off on Let’s Talk About Cloud Baby)

Unless you have been living off-the-grid on some remote island in the last 10 years, you are probably familiar with the cloud and most likely use it on a daily basis; to store documents, download music and stream TV shows. As the cloud-based applications begin to grow in popularity, businesses are investing time to understand its benefits and are gravitating towards it in record numbers. ATS Cloud-Based TimeWork OnDemand, is a secure, time and attendance solution that is backed by unwavering service and support, that is available 24/7, anywhere, anytime you need it.

Let’s Talk About Cloud Baby

Product solution by business size includes:

TimeWork OnDemand for Small Business -ATS TimeWork OnDemand for small businesses is easy-to-use, affordable and helps you with– things like accessing data in real-time, employee scheduling, wage and hour compliance and paid time off tracking. Small businesses looking for a cloud-based time and attendance solution that can help prevent buddy-punching will find ATS array of biometric time clocks the perfect choice for the modern workforce.

TimeWork OnDemand for Midsize Businesses – Just imagine no more paper timesheets, spreadsheets, punch timecards, and countless wasted hours manual repetitive time and attendance data entry and corrections. ATS TimeWork OnDemand automates the time collection process, applies work-rule and payroll policies, including; grace, breaks, rounding and overtime, and calculates and immediately sends data to your payroll software. And, you can do this from any tablet, mobile device or workstation that’s connected to the Internet-and, that’s the power of the cloud!

TimeWork OnDemand for Large Businesses- ATS understands that you must manage your business as a single globally integrated enterprise, rather than as a loose collection of independent businesses. You need a large and connected time and attendance solution that will increase your agility, and also enable you to instill consistent business processes to meet the twin challenges of size and complexity. ATS TimeWork OnDemand for large businesses is both flexible and robust enough, to replace, those aging, disparate manual systems that’s used throughout your different locations. Now, by using ATS TimeWork OnDemand you can proactively help control payroll costs, increase productivity, improve compliance and enhance revenue opportunities.

Now you can re-imagine your business. The best-of-breed applications in ATS cloud time and attendance is integrated with Payroll, ERP, Talent Management, HR, CRM and analytic capabilities to help you increase productivity, lower costs, and improve controls.

To explore ATS time and attendance solutions, you can download a live demonstration and to speak to an account executive, call us at; 1.866.294.2467.

Let’s Talk About Cloud Baby

Workforce Statistics And Job Recovery, What Recovery?

September 9th, 2014 | Posted by Apex Time Solutions in Labour Forecasting | Payroll | Time and Attendance Blog - (Comments Off on Workforce Statistics And Job Recovery, What Recovery?)

The latest job numbers from both the US and Canada paint a gloomy picture. Some experts contend that the reported numbers show how much catching up the economy has to do after the great recession. So, is there any end in sight to these gloomy numbers? Regarding payroll, in its most recent report the US department of labor states:

“Payroll employment increases in August (+142,000); unemployment rate changes little (6.1%) Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in August, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.1 percent. Job gains occurred in professional and business services and in health care.”

And on productivity, it states in part, “Productivity increased 2.3 percent in the nonfarm business sector in the second quarter of 2014; unit labor costs decreased 0.1 percent (seasonally adjusted annual rates). In manufacturing, productivity increased 3.3 percent and unit labor costs decreased 1.6 percent.”

Are these the type of numbers we can expect to see in the upcoming months or is this just an anomaly? Some experts suggest that the job reports are inaccurate, and that statisticians, are not using the right forecasting tools hence, the numbers do not equate to the true unemployment figures.

One thing’s for sure with employment at an all time high for recent graduates and many older workers, let’s all hope we do not slip back into a recession anytime soon.

 

Workforce Statistics And Job Recovery, What Recovery?

The ongoing debate about the advantages of a cloud based solution and whether it can help businesses achieve its objectives while lowering operational costs continues. Some have argued, in the past, that the cloud was a “Johnny comelately” with no staying power. Cloud based services have not only eclipsed this argument but they have become an attractive option for mid-large enterprises that find the value in adopting a solution that cuts down on IT infrastructure.

Apex Time Solutions provides an integrated software-as-a-service (saas) workforce management software that includes the following modules: overtime equalization, forecasting, employee scheduling, labour analytics, job costing, employee self-service and benefit accruals. The core application of TimeWork provides functionality for data integration to such solutions as; talent management, payroll, enterprise resource planning, human resources information systems and customer relationship management.

ATS TimeWork is robust, simple to use and adapts to needs of industries in many verticals. Our cloud time and attendance solution alleviates your IT burden, risk and the variables associated with on premise deployments. You experience peace of mind with predictable costs, reliable system availability and regular software upgrades and maintenance with ATS time and attendance cloud solution.

Here are three reasons to deploy an ATS cloud time and attendance solution:

Portability – Allow you to access business intelligence data through the cloud in real-time. ATS Cloud time and attendance captures employee time and helps promote consistent policy enforcement while also helping companies comply with local, provincial and federal labour laws.

Implementation Independence – ATS workforce management domain architecture lets companies configure their applications environments with different legal entities and site combinations while consolidating different instances.

Software Access- Anywhere, Anytime –ATS cloud time and attendance can be access through any computer, Smartphone or tablet PC with Internet access. Browser compatibility includes: Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Opera.

If you are still not convinced about the power of ATS cloud time and attendance, contact us and we will put you in touch with some of our customers. To learn more, download a demo, or go to our website.

 

While it’s easy to get an expert in just about every field, it’s fair to say no one could have predicted how big the smart phone and tablet PC market would become. Sure there were signs of it but the success of these products has skyrocketed. Apple recently announced that the iBooks 2 will be equipped with electronic textbooks and the techworld is going gaga over this.

Our seasoned programmers at Apex Time Solutions don’t lack for big ambition. As a group, we remain committed to aligning our products with the latest technology for our customers. The ATS time and attendance solution for smart phones and tablet PCs has a robust set of features and capabilities. Companies with on-the-go workers can submit hours wherever they are and supervisors can track and enforce attendance policies easier than ever before.

This application is ideal for managers because it’s easy to use and lets them quickly accomplish tasks. Employees with smart phones can request vacation, review their work hours and schedules.  

 Benefits to ATS Tablet PC and Smartphone application:

  • Real-time SaaS time and attendance functionality
  • Software is available 24/7, 365 days a year
  • Employees can request vacation and review shifts remotely through the employee self-service module
  • On the spot reports for time costing, payroll summary and employee leave
  • GPS Coordinate collection : (see when and where punches take place)
  • Managers can deny or grant employee leave through their GUI
  • The application provides flexibility for HR and Payroll to process information more efficiently

Benefits of ATS TimeWork:

  • Workforce Scheduling helps align employee schedules to key performance indicators (KPIs), optimizing company performance
  • Cost savings by means of accurately tracking employee attendance, reducing overtime, and eliminating human errors
  • The ATS software enables an organization to analyze, forecast and optimize staffing requirements
  • Labour Analytics provides managers a summary of vital workforce data for better planning
  • Display of up to the minute real-time labour reports for workforce planning
  • Reduce operational costs by lowering overtime and premiums to a minimum
  • Software notifications triggers real-time alerts to managers regarding issues that requires immediate attention

ATS time and attendance improves usability for labour analytics, absence management and scheduling. To learn more go to our website.

A couple of months ago we signed a customer up with our cloud-based solution. During training she could not hide how excited she was about the prospect of accessing: reports, attendance trends, audit trails and downloading employee hours to her payroll software using her tablet PC.

The challenges of running a business are real, and in our experience, business executives opt for solutions that are commensurate and adaptable to their needs. Our solution provides all the benefits of an employee time management solution without the IT infrastructure requirements (database, server hardware, data backups, security management, system management, service packs and patches, etc.). The

ATS on-demand time and attendance solution does not require installation of any software on your employee workstations or network.  

The ATS hosted solution gives you instant access to: real-time labour reports, overtime hours, employee vacation request and labour forecasting all designed to reduce payroll costs.

We came across a wonderful article by Frances Burks titled “Disadvantage of Overtime Work” and the issues associated with this phenomenon including: health problems, employee performance and the financial drawback.

In recent years, a wave of lawsuits have uncovered the fact that some employers did not have an effective tool to track and control employee overtime and other pay premiums. While there are some similarities with how overtime is paid in some jurisdictions, others vary significantly. These overtime class action suits demonstrate the need for workplace compliance. 

The easiest way to improve compliance and protect your organization from wage and hour lawsuits is to implement the ATS time and attendance system. The ATS time and attendance will help your organization:

  • Apply multijurisdictional pay and work policies
  • Track, manage and pay daily, weekly and bi-weekly overtime, premiums, call- ins and collective bargaining agreement overtime pay
  • Provide accurate audit trails and records of hours worked in the event of wage and hour disputes
  • Automate employee pay and rate changes mandated by complex collective bargaining agreements
  • Ensure compliance with provincial, federal and state regulations such as FMLA and FLSA
  • Generate reports for wage and hour claims, wrongful termination litigation, and other legal inquiries
  • Provide audit trails and accurate records of hours worked in the event of a wage and hour audit

 The ATS time and attendance system rules engine has enhanced flexibility that can determine specific types of pay. The system optimizes employee resources and reduces labour costs with employee scheduling, labour forecasting and benefit accruals. Our system helps you gain insight into the labour activities and achieve bottom-line results.

To learn more you can follow us on Twitter or download our brochures from our website. Our workforce management software user group is open for registration to current and potential customers.