Reddy Reckoner

Workforce management solution from Kronos has helped pharma major Dr.Reddy’s streamline workforce compliance and power up productivity

By KTP Radhika

Established in 1984 as an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturer, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories is an integrated pharmaceutical company today. The company offers a portfolio of products and services in India and overseas. Its products include APIs, Custom Pharmaceutical Services (CPS), generics, biosimilars, differentiated formulations and News Chemical Entities (NCEs), all delivered through three key businesses—pharmaceutical services and active ingredients, global generics, and proprietary products.

Dr. Reddy’s has significant presence in major markets such as India, USA, Russia and CIS, Germany, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, South Africa, Romania and New Zealand. In terms of net sales, the Hyderabad-headquartered firm is the third largest pharmaceutical company in India; in fiscal 2011-12, it clocked revenues of Rs 6,739 crore.

The HR challenge
In the past few years, the company has seen rapid growth. For instance, since 2007-08, it has more than doubled its net profits from Rs 475 crore to Rs 912 crore in 2011-12. In India, the company runs 20 plants (17 of which, are manufacturing centers) and operates with a workforce of about 5,000 people. The rapid growth in business and number of employees also brought in enormous challenges in terms of effectively managing the growing workforce, and this threw up the need for an integrated workforce solution. The management spotted several gaps. To start with, there was little visibility into critical workforce data. “Our workforce functions from different sections in various shifts. There was no punching mechanism and we were doing the whole process manually,” says S. Padmanabhan, Director- HR. “Without a proper workforce management system, the co-ordination process was very difficult and we were not having proper visibility into our workforce. Reports were not generated properly and online availability of employee data was a problem.” Such issues became a hindrance for the management to formulate policies and come up with more effective workforce-related decisions to ensure that compliance requirements are being met.

The management decided to implement a comprehensive workforce management solution across the company. “We knew that Kronos was an industry leader in workforce management solutions and was in this space for many years. Also, some of our foreign sites have been using the company’s solutions to fix similar issues,” says Padmanabhan. Dr Reddy’s also made a few customer visits before choosing Kronos, and got extremely interested in the product for its sheer potential to synchronize human resource efficiency. Thus in April 2012, Dr. Reddy’s Hyderabad unit implemented Kronos’ workforce management solution.

The benefits
The benefits were manifold. The solution helped the company manage workforce-related compliance issues better than ever, provide centralized workforce visibility and control, and efficiently manage a variety of labor regulations by automating employee scheduling, time and attendance and absence management processes. “The workforce management solution was integrated into their SAP HR and payroll system for seamless management of employee data and accurate payroll management,” says James Thomas, Country Head, Kronos. “We start where typical enterprise resource planning (ERP) stops. Our solution acts as an integrating platform between a typical ERP solution and the employee.”

Explains Padmanabhan, “We have implemented SAP payroll and needed the workforce data to go directly into the payroll and process it without any human intervention. So we implemented the Kronos system.” The  solution is helping Dr Reddy’s to have real-time availability of employee data, enabling the management to come up with more effective and in-depth workforce-related decisions. “We are now able to track in real-time how many people are inside the company and how many are outside, which is helping us maintain more discipline,” feels Padmanabhan.

Data integrity was the other major benefit for the company. The HR department is now able to pull out accurate data with little effort and is able to take more focused policy decisions. According to Padmanabhan, with the new system, reports can be generated very easily with out any errors. “Employees are now able to track their attendance, leave status and similar details online,” he says.

Furthermore, self-service Kronos kiosks were set up inside the company to help the employees enter data, apply for leaves and check their attendance online. These kiosks are located in places such as canteens and similar areas where employees usually gather. “Now approvals are getting done online. This is also helping the HR department get a consolidated list of attendance at the end of every month, which is making the over all process simpler, consolidated and connected,” adds Padmanabhan. Dr. Reddy’s also uses Kronos clocks, which are automated time-keeping machines, that help them to better  record employee time transactions.

Clearly, the new solution has brought in a series of tangible initial benefits, but Dr. Reddy’s is not stopping its IT empowerment process there. “As of now, we have implemented the solution in eight locations. Now we are planning to implement it in the rest of the places shortly and have started the process. The process will be completed in the next two quarters,” sums up Padmanabhan.