The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) oversees 35 adult institutions and eight juvenile centers, each with a medical unit managed by California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS). With facilities spread around the state, CDCR employs approximately 66,000 people, from correctional officers to medical staff. The organization's mission is to protect the public by safely and securely supervising adult and juvenile offenders, providing effective rehabilitation and treatment, and integrating offenders successfully into the community.
Challenges
CDCR struggled to find real-time labor data, making it difficult to achieve efficient workforce management. Using disparate legacy systems and manual processes to schedule staff required time-consuming manual analysis and validation. Consistently applying business rules across the enterprise, including assigning shifts and overtime by seniority, was challenging. HR staff at each institution also spent days manually calculating staff overtime. CDCR needed greater accountability of staffing, posts, overtime costs, and leave usage from a system that could automate employee scheduling and communications.
Solutions
CDCR sought an automated solution that could eliminate scheduling inefficiencies and optimize the workforce through real-time data and reporting while creating uniform schedules in compliance with union and department rules. Following a review, CDCR selected UKG TeleStaff™, a solution designed specifically to meet the scheduling needs of public safety agencies.
After implementing TeleStaff to automate employee scheduling and connecting it to the department's SAP time management solution, CDCR deployed a new enterprise time and shift solution. With the solution integrations, over 700 CDCR and CCHCS scheduling staff use TeleStaff to pass assignment schedules and payroll data to SAP, which accurately captures scheduling data, processes time, and calculates overtime.
CDCR has seen scheduling uniformity; consistent application of union and department rules; and better overtime and leave management, data sharing, and payroll accuracy. Decision makers have real-time visibility into the disposition of CDCR's 35,000 posted custody and nursing staff members.
"UKG TeleStaff allows us to maximize the effectiveness of our workforce. This enterprise solution gives us real-time data on individual institutions statewide and analysis on it."
Joe Panora
Director, Enterprise Information Services
Results
Automating employee scheduling has created scheduling uniformity and reduced grievances, with all department and union policies built into the solution.
"With standardization, it is clearly evident that everybody is treated the same," said Paul Smith, Program Director, Business Information System. "Now there's one set of seniority rules, so shifts and overtime are awarded consistently." When legislation required reducing the inmate parole population and led to layoffs, standardized seniority reduced the workforce fairly. An enterprisewide view of the workforce enables efficient post placements.
Integration across scheduling, time management, and payroll ensures employees receive accurate regular, overtime, and premium pay. Whether employees are at their home institution or at another facility, their time is tracked and they can be confident of receiving correct paychecks.
Leave time accountability has improved too. Before, employees who took leave could be unaware they had no time available and owed CDCR for this time. Now, with real-time leave balances, if employees call in sick and have no leave time, they are made aware of this situation, reducing sick leave taken and instances of docked pay.
Gaining enterprisewide workforce data used to require merging institutions' spreadsheets, with data often 30 to 60 days old. "UKG TeleStaff allows us to maximize the effectiveness of our workforce," said Joe Panora, Director, Enterprise Information Services. "This enterprise solution gives us real-time data on individual institutions statewide and analysis on it
A color-coded report shows managers which employees regularly take sick leave immediately before or after their regular days off. Vacancy reports show which posts are most often vacant, potentially increasing overtime costs to staff them.
"This data allows us to dig deeper into the root causes, to do overtime analysis by institution and do comparisons," explained Smith. "We can look at data from an enterprise standpoint and how to make decisions and save money from a micro and macro level."
Calculating overtime used to take up to five HR staff at each institution four or five days every month. Overtime is now calculated automatically, creating potential savings of $1.5 million annually, and these HR employees can focus on other job activities.
"Because processes are more efficient, we have more time to do analysis," said Smith. "We don't need to spend as much time on administrative overhead but can do analysis to make us more efficient."
"Our goal is to become automated end to end," said Panora, "so we can be as efficient as possible."
