Microsoft Office System
Partner Solution Case Study
Workforce Management Solution Provider
Improves Sales and Time to Market with OBA
Overview
Country or Region: North America,
Worldwide
Industry: Software - Workforce
Management Solutions
Partner Profile
Kronos Incorporated (www.kronos.com),
based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts,
markets workforce management software
solutions. Its flagship product, Workforce
Central, incorporates a number of Office
Business Application components.
Business Situation
Kronos customers demanded a more
dynamic alternative to the static, hardcoded reporting options that Kronos
provided.
Solution
Kronos created an Office Business
Application, Workforce Worksheet, which
uses the rich reporting capabilities of
Microsoft Office Excel 2007® for workforce
performance reporting.
Benefits
 Enhance sales
 Grow market
 Cut product development cost
 Speed time-to-market
“Our current customers already love our solution, but
we can offer them more with our OBA component.”
Marc Cajolet, Director User Experience, Kronos Incorporated
Kronos® Incorporated, the leading workforce management solution
provider, required a better way to provide its customers with rich
but inexpensive reporting and analytics capabilities. Kronos found
increasing customer demand for easy access to flexible reporting
that static reports couldn’t provide without extensive modification.
Yet these custom reports were difficult to develop and modify.
Kronos included an Office Business Application (OBA) component
built within Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 with the latest release
of its flagship offering, Workforce Central® 6.1. This OBA, called
Workforce Worksheet™, provides ready access to the wealth of
high-quality workforce performance data within Workforce Central,
and enables Kronos customers to relate workforce performance
with other critical business performance data. By adopting an OBA
product development strategy, Kronos was able to increase
customer interest in its products, leading to additional sales, and
reduce product development effort.
Situation
For more than three decades, Kronos
Incorporated, based in Chelmsford,
Massachusetts, has delivered workforce
management software solutions. These
software solutions automate employeecentric processes, such as payroll and
absence management, as well as workforce
optimization processes, such as labor
analytics and resource leveling across
projects or work sites. The company has
become the market leader in workforce
management solutions, and the company’s
products enjoy an install base of 30 million
worldwide and a presence in more than half
of the Fortune 1000® companies.
“Overnight we had an
OBA strategy to extend
Workforce Central data
to Excel 2007 for
reporting as an
alternative to our
traditional reporting
methods.”
Marc Cajolet, Director User Experience,
Kronos Incorporated
In the early 2000s, Kronos expanded the
business value of its flagship product,
Workforce Central, by developing Web-based
data collection and reporting solutions for the
product. These solutions enabled global
organizations to easily collect workforce data
from distributed work sites around the world,
store the data centrally, and distribute the
data as needed to every corner of the
organization. Prior to the release of Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007®, Kronos
began integrating SharePoint technologies
within Workforce Central. Kronos developers
used SharePoint Server and SharePoint Web
parts to build an enhanced user interface for
Workforce Central that streamlined common
tasks and boosted worker productivity.
Kronos also used SharePoint technologies to
embed automated process management
capabilities within Workforce Central that
reduce manual tasks for human resources
managers and allow them to focus on
workforce analysis and optimization.
While these features greatly enhanced the
business value of Workforce Central, Kronos
recognized an opportunity to improve the
reporting capabilities of the product. Kronos
provided a comprehensive portfolio of
standard, predefined reports. But like many
providers of enterprise solutions, Kronos had
to address customers’ unique needs though
custom reports—either developed by Kronos
or by the customer’s in-house resources.
Depending on the complexity of the reporting
requirements, these custom reports could
require a considerable development
investment. Moreover, because these custom
reports were often built using static code,
modifying reports or integrating additional
data from other enterprise systems was
cumbersome and time-consuming.
Kronos began investigating alternative
reporting methods in order to maximize the
benefit of Workforce Central to its customers.
Solution
In 2007, Kronos product developers
participated in an Office Business Application
(OBA) briefing session with a Microsoft
development partner to investigate how an
OBA product development strategy could
align with Kronos’ product development
goals. Over the course of two days, the
participants brainstormed about which OBA
components could most enhance Kronos
products, and the discussion quickly turned
to improving the reporting capabilities of
Workforce Central. According to Marc Cajolet,
User Experience Director at Kronos: “The
session ended with a particularly engaging
discussion—we all huddled around a
whiteboard and overnight we had an OBA
strategy to extend Workforce Central data to
Excel 2007 for reporting as an alternative to
our traditional reporting methods.”
Over the next four weeks, Kronos software
developers quickly turned those original
whiteboard diagrams into a working proof of
concept (POC). The POC proved that
Workforce Central data could be quickly and
easily transferred to Excel 2007 for analysis
and detailed reporting. Once the data was in
Excel 2007, workforce performance data
could be related directly to other business
performance data to provide important
operational insights to managers across an
organization. Most importantly, the Excel
2007 based reporting capabilities reduced
the dependence on expensive software
developers to create custom reports—the
same rich reporting capabilities were
incorporated directly into the familiar Excel
2007 interface.
Following a demonstration of the POC to
product development managers, Kronos
management decided to incorporate the POC,
which was named Workforce Worksheet, into
the upcoming release of Workforce Central as
an alternative to traditional development.
“In 75 percent of our
presentations to new
customers, Workforce
Worksheet is a key
attention grabber.”
Jon Handschke, Sales Engineer, Kronos
Incorporated
Benefits
highly visible across an organization and it’s
something that our customers appreciate
immediately.”
As the company’s current customer base has
become more sophisticated IT consumers,
Kronos has kept pace by offering more
sophisticated IT solutions. “More and more,
our customers want to actually use all of the
data they collect—they want to be able to
visualize their performance data and make
more informed decisions” says Cajolet. “They
get really excited about the ability to quickly
make sophisticated dashboards in Excel
2007 without relying on IT specialists. Our
current customers already love our solution,
but we can offer them more with our OBA
component.”
By pursuing an OBA strategy for product
development, Kronos was able to realize a
number of key benefits, including expanded
business opportunities, the ability to better
meet customer requirements, a reduction in
product development, and greater marketing
reach by leveraging Microsoft partner
resources.
Kronos is also reaching new customers in
different market segments. “We’re getting a
great deal of interest from new customers in
Workforce Worksheet,” says Jon Handschke,
Sales Engineer at Kronos. “In 75 percent of
our presentations to new customers,
Workforce Worksheet is a key attention
grabber.”
Expanding Business Opportunities
By including OBA components within its
workforce management solution, Kronos was
able deliver more value to its customers and
drive net-new sales as a result. The value of
Workforce Worksheet is easy to explain to
potential customers. “A lot of the
enhancements in
the latest release of
Workforce Central,
version 6.1, are
‘under the hood’,”
says Andrew West,
Product Marketing
Manager at Kronos. “There are some
valuable additions—but these enhancements
are not immediately visible to customers.
Workforce Worksheet, on the other hand, is
right on the desktop—it’s a component that is
Kronos also uses Workforce Worksheet for
product demonstrations to potential
customers as part of the presales effort.
Often, these demonstrations are the key to
adequately communicating the business
value of Workforce Central to a potential
customer. “We recently won some net-new
business as a direct result of Workforce
Worksheet,” recalls Handschke. “The
customer gave us an example of a report they
needed, and asked for a rough order of
magnitude for what it would take to build the
report using our solution. We used Workforce
Worksheet to build the actual report for the
customer, and we turned it around in a day.
The Workforce Worksheet OBA solution has
made our sales force much more adaptable.”
“We didn’t need to do a
deep dive in order to
investigate how the OBA
components worked—all
of the OBA components
were right on the
surface for us to begin
integrating and building
into our solution.”
Marc Cajolet, Director User Experience,
Kronos Incorporated
Better Meeting Customer Requirements
As labor costs come under closer scrutiny in
the current economic downturn, many
organizations are extending their workforce
management
solutions beyond
managing employee
time and attendance,
HR and payroll
processes, and
hiring. These
organizations want to draw meaningful
conclusions about operational efficiency by
comparing workforce performance data with
other business data. Kronos found that Excel
2007 provides an excellent environment to
pool data from multiple sources. The Kronos
reporting solution provides important
business insight that improves operational
decision making for an organization. The
embedded Microsoft reporting engine, SQL
Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) and
the close integration with Excel 2007 make it
possible for organizations to transform
workforce data directly into actionable
business intelligence. “With Workforce
Worksheet, managers can relate workforce
performance data, like the average time it
takes for a worker to complete a task, directly
with other business data, like the number of
sales over a period,” says Handschke. “This
insight—how workforce performance affects
business performance—is critical in improving
business efficiency.”
The Kronos OBA solution also reduces
reporting costs. Workforce Worksheet, in
conjunction with the other SharePoint Server
2007 interfaces available in Workforce
Central, allows organizations to avoid costs
associated with custom report development
while still providing all of the benefits
associated with rich reporting and data
visualization. “With Workforce Worksheet,
customers can create sophisticated reports
that pull data from multiple sources and
refresh automatically. These reports contain
detailed charts and visualizations, and are
easily transferrable to SharePoint Server
through SharePoint Web parts for distribution
across an organization,” says Cajolet. “To do
something similar without Workforce
Worksheet would require a considerable
investment in report development and a Webbased reporting infrastructure.”
Leveraging the Microsoft R&D Effort
Kronos has heavily leveraged Microsoft
technologies in the past. The current release
of Workforce Central is
built using Microsoft
SQL Server 2008®,
SharePoint Server 2007,
and 2007 Office system
components. By adopting
an OBA product development strategy,
Kronos was able to considerably reduce the
cost and cycle time to develop Workforce
Worksheet.
Kronos developers used premade
components of the 2007 Office system in
their solution and benefited from the rich
2007 Office system APIs, integration points,
and documentation. “We didn’t need to do a
deep dive in order to investigate how the OBA
components worked,” says Cajolet. “All of the
OBA components were right on the surface
for us to begin integrating and building into
our solution.”
The Kronos OBA strategy also considerably
reduced project risk. “We were able to quickly
determine what functionality and which OBA
components would deliver the best return on
investment,” says Cajolet. “We didn’t build
any demo-ware. Everything we built during
the initial development was real and used
real data. At each step in the development of
Workforce Worksheet, we clearly understood
the development costs required and the
functionality that was feasible. This foresight
would not have been possible without using
Microsoft Office system components.”
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Kronos
products and services, call (978) 2509800 or visit the Web site at:
www.kronos.com
By leveraging existing Microsoft R&D, Kronos
was able to save a considerable amount of
time and cost during the development of
Workforce Worksheet. “The development
team brought
Workforce Central
from POC to product
in about 12 weeks
and consumed 67
person-weeks in
development labor, a
phenomenal achievement,” says Cajolet.
“From the standpoint of development time
and cost, this was considered a small effort
internally, but one that had a large impact.”
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business
world’s chosen environment for information
work, providing the programs, servers, and
services that help you succeed by
transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft
Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
Leveraging the Microsoft Partner Program
Microsoft and Kronos have enjoyed a fruitful
partnership for more than a decade. Kronos
participates in the Microsoft Partner Program,
which provides the company with important
information about Microsoft product
development strategies and roadmaps.
Kronos also influences those roadmaps by
providing valuable insight to Microsoft.
According to Cajolet, “the real success of this
partnership is the combination of Microsoft
support and the readiness of the technology.”
Software and Services

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published June 2009
Kronos, the Kronos logo and Workforce Central are registered
trademarks, and Workforce Worksheet is a trademark, of
Kronos Incorporated or a related company.
Products
− Microsoft Office 2007
− Microsoft Office Business Applications