Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) will retire their Workforce Central (WFC) product and require clients to move to UKG Pro Workforce Management (WFM), formerly known as Dimensions. HealthNET has been helping hospitals and health systems migrate to Pro WFM / Dimensions for years. So, as UKG customers try to determine how best to proceed, they come to us with questions like: “How can we migrate quickly and efficiently?” “How can we take full advantage of its functionality at our organization?”
Today we’d like to share some answers and talk specifically about proper planning.
THE BENEFITS OF UKG Pro Workforce Management
While no one is ever thrilled about migration projects, it’s important to understand that UKG Pro WFM is a game-changer for managing your workforce. It combines a cloud environment, artificial intelligence, analytics, and mobile technology to make users happier and more productive — from clinicians and their managers to HR and payroll staff, finance, IT, hospital executives, etc. Here are some highlights:
- Runs on any device: Unlike WFC, Pro WFM is a single web-based system with full capabilities and consistent access to functionality whether the user is working on a PC, phone, or tablet – onsite or from home. For people accessing important data and performing time-sensitive tasks — managers and staff alike — this matters every day.
- Data views at a glance: UKG Pro Workforce Management gives you quick, actionable insights at your fingertips with “dataviews” (that replace WFC genies). Customized charts and tiles make it easy for managers to access information that matters to them — overtime, productivity, department schedules, employee time, exceptions, and aggregate information in bar graphs, pie charts, etc. With a few clicks, managers can create tiles with different dataviews, save them to their home page, and view the data immediately at any time.
- Access to an incredible amount of data: You can examine much more information using the dataviews in Pro WFM than you could using the genies in WFC — the new system’s data object library is much more robust. Plus, UKG is constantly adding more capabilities — every release provides access to more types of data, enabling ongoing improvements to time & attendance, scheduling, reporting, and other workforce management functions.
PLANNING IS PARAMOUNT
Migrating to UKG Pro Workforce Management is more than a simple “lift and shift.” While some elements can be migrated with ease, other elements will have to be built, such as your organizational structure (called the Business Structure in Pro WFM). Understanding the details of how the new system differs from WFC, planning, and managing change can make all the difference. Here are some recommendations to help make your migration a success:
- Align pay policies (aka pay practices) before you migrate. Healthcare is full of mergers and acquisitions, and those events can often result in inconsistent pay practices across facilities and/or departments. If that’s true at your organization, we recommend standardizing your pay policies before you migrate, especially if you want to centralize functions (staff scheduling, for example) and/or enable your clinicians to float easily throughout the organization. Doing so will help ensure smooth testing, training, and go-live (and help prevent your payroll team from going mad!).
- Determine if you’ll need help. Hopefully, your UKG Pro Workforce Management migration team members helped build your current WFC system and know the details behind the way it was built. Hopefully, you have sufficient resources to allow them to dedicate significant time to the migration project. Your migration team leaders need to be well-equipped to make key Pro WFM system architecture design decisions. And you’ll need strong change management throughout your entire organization. But if you don’t live in that perfect world (don’t worry, you’re not alone — most organizations don’t!), get some professional help to determine what additional resources you’ll need to ensure a successful migration.
- Involve leadership across the organization. Whether you call it a steering committee, governance, or a task force, having an active group of interdisciplinary leaders to guide and oversee this undertaking and the changes it will bring is essential and most appropriate for a project that touches all of your employees.
- Include best practices in your future state plan. There are differences between WFC and Pro WFM configuration, and it is critical that these are well understood so early decisions on the set-up of your Business Structure, for example, are appropriate for your organization today and for potential future expansion. Additionally, your migration to the new system has many opportunities for process improvement within and outside of HR and payroll — examine current workflows and identify how they will change to maximize those opportunities out of the gate.
- Determine the priority of modules you’ll implement. For WFC customers that currently use Timekeeping and Scheduling, you’ll want to make sure that those modules are brought live in Pro WFM right away. But what about Analytics or Attendance, for example, will you have enough resources to implement that immediately? Determine your organization’s specific priorities. Focus on migrating modules that departments will use right away and identify which ones can be implemented in phase two or phase three.
- Understand that UKG Pro Workforce Management changes rapidly. New features and enhancements are released quarterly and are substantial. It’s a lot to keep up with, and you’ll need an effective system for testing updates and rolling them out. Over the years the pace of updates should slow, but it’s something you need to be aware of and plan for.
NEXT TIME
In our next post, we’ll explore the UKG Pro Workforce Management Business Structure in more detail and explain the differences between it and WFC Labor Levels and the Scheduling Org Map.
If you could benefit from our UKG expertise in the meantime, contact us to discuss how we can help you prepare for a successful Dimensions migration.
Blog Post Authors:
Nicole Erdlen, UKG Consultant
HealthNET Consulting
