By KR Nambiar, CRN, August 4, 2009, 1230 hrs
Kronos is planning to approach mid-market solutions providers to increase its business in the country. For its workforce management solutions, the company plans to engage about 60 partners during the next 12 months.
“Indian market represents a tremendous opportunity for workforce management solutions, and as a worldwide market leader we are best poised to service this requirement. While many enterprise customers have implemented ERP for core business processes, they are yet to automate their workforce management. Our solutions interoperate seamlessly with major ERP vendors such as SAP or Oracle,” explained James Thomas, Country Manager, Kronos India.
Workforce management solution encompasses workforce scheduling, forecasting, planning, dispatching, tracking, assessing to ensure that productivity improves. “Globally, we believe that at any point of time between 0.3 percent and 1.5 percent of workforce is not attending to the job assigned to them, which results in a productivity loss equal to 2 to 5 percent of the payroll of an organization,” said Thomas. “Shockingly in India in some cases its closer to 10 percent in a corporate workplace, and up to 16 percent in some government organizations. Assessment studies done for our clients have thrown up these startling results.”
Thomas says that Kronos solutions are highly configurable and can be adapted to the processes across multiple segments. A 30 year old company Kronos has around 30,000 customers globally.
“The HR automation market is still largely untapped in the country. And we feel mid-market resellers have a great opportunity. With our solutions, we can provide rapid ROI and it’ll be easy for our partners to convince their customers,” he said.
Kronos already has a relationship with the large tier-1 SIs such as Wipro, and is looking forward to building partnerships with around 60 large tier-2 resellers. “There are around 70 clusters (including ongoing projects) in India, which are hosting companies with large workforces. We are trying to work closely-focused on these regional pockets, and are aligning with partners who have regional strengths,” explained Thomas.
Kronos is also planning to work with partners focused on niche verticals such as healthcare, manufacturing and retail, which are said to benefit the maximum from workforce automation solutions. “Presently, we do not plan to appoint any distributor. We plan to work directly with our partners. We can promise our partners better margins than the ERP and other software vendors they work with,” added Thomas. |