Kronos' HR products to help firms' profits

With Indian firms going global and global firms coming to India, many of the Fortune 1000 firms are using solutions to keep track of their employees spread across geographies.

Checking employee productivity, and when there are large numbers of them, is a challenge firms face.

With manufacturing seeing tremendous recruitments, and with the margin pressures getting more severe, increasing employee output and productivity have become the key to profitability. Hence, ensuring better productivity of employees through automation of the human capital management is catching up.

Kronos, which claims to be a global leader in workforce management solutions, says its solutions help reduce costs, increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction and enhance the level of service they provide.

The firm is now looking at the industrial belts of Coimbatore and Mumbai-Pune. This is in addition to the BPO firms in Bangalore and NCR.

Kronos is concentrating on firms that have large workforce and high employee turnover. The workforce management industry has been growing at 18-20 per cent per annum. It has been one of the fastest-growing spaces in the human capital management space, which itself is growing at 9 per cent per annum.

BPO firms which are customer facing and labour intensive critically need to track employee productivity and Kronos' software helps track this. To ensure a consistent employee experience and in turn better customer experience, some software applications make a big difference. The solutions help track the work an individual does while in office.

According to James Thomas, managing director, Kronos, "You can guide employees when aware of what they are doing. The system also allows bonus points to employees when they meet certain targets at work." This influence of the software on HR finally impacts profitability, added Thomas.

In 2005, the ERM space was $100 million and by early 2008 it grew to $150 million. Of this, the HR market is 25-30 per cent. These solutions have been helping in better and more effective HR interventions which in the end lead to better profitability.

The solutions are used by 95 per cent of the hospitals and some 65 per cent of the retail sector in the US. They are expected to only grow in popularity over time.