UKG Ready Reviews

Kronos is easy to use and the customer service is great to work with. With Kronos, you can keep track of payroll, absence, accrued time off, and everything "time" related all within a single program. This has been a major time saver when compared to our old system.

I have had issues with Kronos going down here and there; but that is to be expected. Major downside to this is playing catch-up.

Easy to click on fields desired to report on

A participant's information does not show up all on one line. Making it difficult to use in Excel.
The PTO request is not intuitive and I waste time doing a request. This should be a much simpler process as all employees do these.
I don't like the report resetting all the time while I am using it. Should stay where I was at.
Better Dep[t tools, like Pay History should be a canned report.
Should be able to go back and pull pay rates and headcount by specifying date, so system would have to know what pay rate was in effect at date selected.

It's still a work in process but we have found many things that we do like about Workforce Ready:
1. Customization - This system offers you the ability to customize your screens down to the individual level, as well as creating customized screens for other types of users. So if you want your Managers to log in and see a Timekeeping dashboard with graphs, and your Employee to log in and see employee related actions, and your Benefits Administrator to see a Benefits screen, you can set that up as defaults. Then each person can also customize their screens if they like and save them.
2. Reporting - if you need list style reports then this system offers one of the best reporting tools for easily building and customizing reports. Almost every screen is considered a "report" and you can add and delete columns as needed and then save that for later use, or even make it your default screen. Almost every screen is able to be exported in a variety of formats as well. You can also schedule reports to run automatically, as well as have them e-mailed automatically to Managers, etc. on a routine basis.
3. Notifications - This system offers the ability to automatically send e-mail notifications, reports, etc. for disciplinary actions, attendance tracking, reviews and other items. This is very helpful for our Managers and keeps them up to date on their to-do list.
4. Tools - Workforce Ready does have its own learning system, and they also offer many webinars, customer groups, KronosWorks, and customer sites that allow you to connect with one another if you have similar questions or problems.
5. Modules All Accessible from One Log-in - This was important to us as our other systems required us to log-in multiple times if we were trying to get into the Applicant module or Timekeeping. This is all easily found under one log-in. Very easy and timesaving.

As we go through the implementation process there have been a few surprises and disappointments:
1. Reporting - Yes, this is a Pro as far as customization and easy list reporting, but I do wish they had a more complex reporting tool available as well. If you want to have subtotals, grand totals, averages, grouped reports, add in formulas, etc. it is not easy to do in the reporting tool itself and you may have to export the list report out and finish building out the report in Excel or Word to get it how you really need it to be.
2. No Point-In-Time Reporting - This seems like it would be a given, but as we found out after the fact, we cannot do point in time reports. I feel like this is something we would have asked during our evaluation of the product, but again almost all products offer this now so perhaps we made a wrong assumption.
3. System Needs "Polished" - We knew going in that this product did not look as "user-friendly" as some of the other products. We felt like the flexibility of the system made up for it. However, as we are setting up our onboarding, our applicant site, and reviews we are starting to see the drawbacks in this. If you have users who are not as comfortable on a computer, this lack of "polish" and user-friendliness can make it difficult for them to understand the processes, and how to get through the screens. We also do not have the ability to customize the applicant website as much as we would like to help draw in applicants.
4. General Ledger - We came from another provider who did have a great General Ledger product, and this one was definitely a step back. Also, if your GL is tied in with your jobs you do have to have two separate lists in this system - the GL is not linked with the Jobs list in HR. So if someone changes position we have to update it in two places in order to keep the GL correct. This also comes into play if we add new jobs into the system - we have to update two lists. We also had to separate out our overtime into two pay codes since we have the overtime premium going to a different GL code. In our old system, they could have one pay code separated into two GL codes. We did not discover this until after we went live and so our associates started out seeing it one way on their check, and then another way, so it was very confusing for them.
5. On-site Training- This was contracted out to a partner of Kronos. It was not what we expected at all for the price we paid. You are better off to use the items built into the system or do it yourself.
6. Security - Yes, security is a pro, but some of the security set-ups in this system do make it very difficult and frustrating for our associates and applicants to get into the system on a regular basis which is a con. The system will automatically lock out any associate or applicant that does not log in every 14 days. However, the system tends to lock out every new user as well the first time they try to log-in. This is annoying and can make it difficult for those on off-shifts, as they have to contact us to get unlocked and then try logging in again within 24 hours. In addition, it does require you to enter a code if you're getting in on a new computer. It does have the option to check a box and only enter the code every 30 days, but that only applies to that specific computer and sometimes will not work depending on your cookie setting. Since most of our associates work in the plant, they only get on the system to print out check stubs every other week. They have to enter a code almost every time they log on to our public computers. This code has to be sent to their designated phone number or e-mail and cannot be easily changed to another number or e-mail. So if they forget their phone, or don't have their e-mail password with them, it can really make it difficult to get logged on, leading to frustration for them and a negative outlook on the system.

I like most that on the home screen it has various links available to click in regards to the company. For example all of the holidays listed for the year

I don't like that the features on the mobile app are limited.

This software is easy to use and user friendly. And almost all the features are available for payroll management, leave management and HR management. The best part is that we can use this software for appraisal as well wherein employee performance assessment, goal setting and ratings can declare into this.

Some features are missing wrt. time management and need some improvement on this. Rest all are good.

The termination process is less steps than it was in Kronos Workforce Central

Using WFR is like taking a trip back in time. The functionality of the system is very clunky, and resembles the old dos systems. There is no room to customize to fit our company needs. We were told that this system would free up our team to do other projects, if anything it has increased the time needed to preform. The date sensitivity is very annoying, when we make changes we should be able to enter them with an effective date, but the system uses the date we are entering the employee changes as the effective date.

During implementation, we were constantly told 'the system does not do that', or 'that can't be done'. Out implementation process was terrible, and we still don't have everything working. Moving from one Kronos product to another should have been seamless, it was anything but seamless. The implementation team should have been able to look at our company in Central and recreate in Ready, without us having to provide everything for them. This was the worst implementation I have ever gone through, it was worse that SAP, which is very sad.

I could go on and on, but I won't. I have a spreadsheet comparing Kronos Workforce Central to Kronos Workforce Ready, if you would like to see it I can provide for you.

Recruiting and Onboarding have made our hiring process much easier.

It is not user friendly from the employee side or the administrator side.

My company has used Kronos for a long time for keeping track of time and attendance. Having this digital system eliminates a lot of human errors in processing our hours worked and time off, and it generally makes the process of entering hours relatively smooth.

I've never found the software to be easy or intuitive to work with and often have to ask our HR department questions about how to use it properly. I've had issues keeping track of my time off and banked holidays, and figuring out my correct count has sometimes taken a lot of effort.

This is such an easy application to use! You can customize your home screen and options! I love that I can make changes to personal info quickly and edit my timesheet all in the same place. Not needing to wait on HR is so convenient

I haven't found any issues for complaint as of now.

Workforce management, integration was not easy however its an enterprise product.

internal security details should be more open and available

The reporting functionality is super easy to use and very helpful. You can report on most anything in the system and since most everything can be exported to excel it's easy to slice and dice for whatever your purposes.

Payroll functionality and customer support. Time keeping works fine but once things are crossed over into payroll, things don't always translate as they are supposed to.

I believe most of the program is very user friendly. I like that everything is tied into the system, payroll, HR, TLM and applicant tracking. There is a lot more that we can utilize that we are not using yet. I like the audit trail feature so I can tell what the employee is doing so I can help teach them the correct way. I like the Favorites option that I just found out how to use that about a month or so ago.

At the time of our purchase, the fire department purchased Telestaff scheduling product that we were told could talk to our payroll system and send information over to Kronos and land on the firefighters timesheet. We have been in implementation for this particular item for almost 2 years now.
I do not particularly like the benefit selection process. I think it is very difficult to read the confirmation page, it does not show the dependents without having to reopen it. It is very confusing when selecting dependents and spouses for a plan. I feel it used to be so much easier to maneuver and read your decisions but now it has added another 10 minutes to the process because you are constantly going back to see if your dependents are selected. I am NOT looking forward to open enrollment this year at all.

Most of the reporting functions are great. The general look and feel of the website is great. Time clocks were easy to update when we got new badges and we never have issues with missed punches. The Manage Payroll function works well. It's easy to make changes to most features to get it working how we want it.

It's difficult to use with shift differential on time off requests. It requires multiple requests off from the employee just to get paid their shift diff correctly.

The accruals function is terrible. It doesn't forecast into the future, which is a HUGE issue for employees & management. This doesn't let employees request for time off using future accrued time off. And, it doesn't give them any way to plan for future vacations. The fact that everything hinges on the anniversary date causes a lot of employee confusion. The Current Balance is supposed to account for Scheduled time off, but when the Scheduled time off is after the employee's anniversary date, it doesn't deduct from the Current Balance, so it causes a ton of confusion. Also, the Current Accrued column makes no sense to employees or even me, and I'm technically the 'Kronos expert' at my company. It would be great if you could get rid of Current Accrued & Taken columns since they cause more confusion and questions than anything else. When an employee using a Bulk Hours schedule requests time off in the current pay period, once the manager approves it, it populates their time card with the time off rows, but it doesn't delete the working hours, so suddenly they have 8 hours of work and 8 hours of vacation on the same day.

While the support desk personnel are helpful, it can be very inconvenient to wait 1-3 days to get help with an issue or question. It's also hard to stop everything I'm doing when Kronos is ready to help me. I feel like my only choice is to drop everything I'm doing, because this is my chance, and I don't want to put it off another day. I feel like this puts all the convenience on Kronos support and none of the convenience on the customer. It would be nice to be able to talk to someone when I have the problem and I'm working on it.

The Kronos update webinars to hear about new features & updates are painful to sit through. The presenter sounds like she's reading a prepared essay for a 7th grade class. I tried attending three webinars, and it was always the same. I feel like I learn nothing with this presentation style because I'm so distracted by the robotic presentation.

The system provides an easy to use punch in/punch out process using bio-metric fingerprint scan, there are customize-able dashboards and reporting functions, and if you have a straightforward business model without the need to segregate costs into multiple Job Orders this is a great system.

The Workforce Ready terminals do not support barcode readers, you have to select everything from a list. They also don't display in the same way you have your Job Orders or Cost Centers setup, they only display as a list view, with some qualifiers for searching. If you need detailed job costing, there are a lot of additional steps required to set up and manage all the data, and there is no inherent connectivity to ERP systems. Middleware is provided to help move data in and out of other systems, but it all has to be custom programmed, which you as the customer are required to provide. If you are using a standard job prefix, there is a limit of 750 records in any one folder, and once you surpass that limit, the functionality of the "Tree View" (which is how everyone is accustomed to viewing a file structure) reverts to a "List View" which is absolutely useless for a large collection of data due to the way it is formatted. Once the limit is reached, the previous functionality can not be restored, which causes a lot of heartache for people that have been accustomed to visually finding the Job number and then have to learn how to search using "Like" or "Between". Knowing this up front would have prevented the purchase of the product, but it took literally weeks of dialog with support to just discover what the issue was when it occurred, and the software engineering team had no interest in fixing the code that caused it.

1. All in one product that including ATS, HR, payroll, benefits, ACA and reporting.
2. One system, one number for customer support, one community (great customer portal), one company you are working with.
3. Employee Self Service is great! You can grant as much or as little access as you would like to complete actions, access data, benefit enrollment, etc.
4. Kronos Team willingness to set up the system the way you need to in order to accomplish business needs.

1. The system is very particular in the way you set up. Ensure you have a good application consultant that understands what your company needs and how they will set this up in your environment. Also, if you chose to bring WFC into the mix, you are dealing with two systems and not one and there is a whole other level of set up you need to consider.
2. No development site. Everything is conducted in live site.
3. Recruitment and onboarding (checklists in general) need to be more flexible. Kronos is working on this and is on road map. We look forward to some improvements.
4. Training in product and training material needs some more work. There is a noticeable difference in training presentation vs. other products (i.e. WFC learning portal vs. WFR offerings). Also, you really will need someone dedicated to learn and understand WFR, as it is very layered.
5. There is not current API offerings, only flat files every 15 minutes can come out of WFR. Kronos is working on adding this capability in near future.

Many modules and what they don't do well they are investing on to make it more of a one-stop shop. Most of the users in the company can use this fairly easily. The setup on the back end is comprehensive. The reporting is good and easy to use, but you can't change the width of columns on the screen and some columns are missing. The support staff takes tickets and work with you over the phone and share screens with you so reporting issues is a breeze. I've been invited to a subgroup for development for a certain feature and it's great to get some eyes on the product before release so i can prepare some training materials for my company.

I mentioned reporting issues is a breeze. The wording I get back fairly often is "working as intended." It's easy for me to say a certain feature may not make sense but for another company it may make lots of sense. I wish there was just a little bit more of product testing for major features. Global Support is very polite and they will operate for your timezone even though most of their support staff are on the east coast.

- free app for employees to use on their phones
-web-based
-seeing my team in one spot on my homescreen

- not user-friendly
-difficult to navigate
- really dislike report section & constantly have to review my notes to get reports to run properly
- many times a punch in/out showed it took on the app, but not on the website

I can't think of any attribute of the Workforce Ready product that I particularly like. My experience with Kronos is that they produce good time and attendance software, but I personally have not seen any evidence that they have any expertise producing HRIS software.

The Kronos Workforce Ready product reminds me of an old fashioned data processing program from 20 years ago. It is not at all user friendly or intuitive. I have used it daily for one year and still am frequently puzzled by the way it is organized (or disorganized). I spend significant time searching for the information I want. Incredibly, the turnover calculation function has not worked correctly for the two years my company has owned the Workforce Ready product. Kronos has known all this time that their turnover function is flawed, but I don't think it is corrected yet; it doesn't appear to be fixed to me. Producing reports from Workforce Ready is cumbersome. The user must pick the data elements for the report from very long lists of fields that truly appear to me to be in no logical order whatsoever. I know that sounds hard to believe, but if there is some logic to the lists of fields, I have yet to understand it. The training information provided by Kronos to teach the user to use Workforce Ready is mostly written documents rather than videos. I personally find videos easier to understand, but Kronos offers only a handful of them. There are many topics I would like to learn about that are not covered at all in any of Kronos' training materials.

It is a user friendly system. Easy reports are easy to customize.

Implementation is awful. They do not send any reps on site to help with implementation. Reports that require Kronos assistance take forever to receive. One took over 6 months to get.

The system itself for payroll purposes is very easy to use and manipulate. Reporting for the most part is simple.

They sell you on how easily you can customize, however this was not what we have witnessed. Setting up an automated report can generally be simple, but doing a simple birthday pull monthly cannot be automated due to limited options within the product.

The only plus for Kronos Ready is that it is Internet based.

Feels like it was made by developers for developers, not for HR/Payroll administration.

Kronos has allowed our organization to house all aspects of employee time-keeping within one application. This has count down significantly on the reports collected because Kronos is tracking attendance, tardy, late out, OT, hours beyond FTE, etc. We have built our program to send notifications directly to management so that they can then handle "issues" as needed.

Implementation and planning efforts to build Kronos out to be as functional/efficient as it currently is took many months & IT work. Our organization did all of this internally, may be easier/quicker if utilizing Kronos for this.

We have a wide variety of pay codes and rules. We have built in overtime, shift differentials, Differentials for field training, etc. I have worked with other software programs and Workforce Ready is a program that has been extremely accurate for time keeping. Workforce is one of the best software programs I have worked on for payroll. It is easy to use and understand.

The only issue I have encountered is when I have employees with multiple codes that fall on a holiday. An example would be: Patrol Officer, who is an FTO while working a holiday. Some hours just don't move over to payroll. However I understand the problem because we are "over-loading" the program with multiple codes.

Kronos Workforce Ready is easy to learn and use. We love that the system is modern and constantly being improved upon. The additional tools that are added as tax and healthcare laws change have been invaluable.

Workforce Ready has been very valuable but adding accounting software to this product would complete it as a ERP system. We really love using this system, but because of our business needs we need a payroll and timekeeping system that is fully integrated with an accounting system. We are forced to transition to another ERP even though Workforce Ready is by far the better product.

The functionality to calculate break times, holiday pay, and unique company-specific pay-policies across our departments. The mobile clock in/out functionality on the app is also helpful for employees that work remotely. Easy to add new employees to the time clock or mobile access.

Sometimes difficult to add new managers.

Manager visibility of mobile clocking in / out of employees (need alerts to the manager).

Also, the call-back delay to speak with a help desk rep can be annoying.