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Beaumont City Council.
Roughly one year’s worth of high-end assistant city manager pay for the city of Beaumont was lost on a contract for $255,383.02 for software that “would not function properly and appropriately for the city’s departments.”
Once determined the product wouldn’t meet the need, the city was still obligated to pay $58,688.80 towards buying out the remainder of the contract.
The software was of most importance, according to the Beaumont staff presenting the problem for City Council to review on Jan. 10.
Supporting documentation for the request to can the company details a laundry list of issues with Kronos Workforce Dimensions, which was to be used by all the city’s departments for the management of payroll, timekeeping and additional human resource functions. Among the problems with the programming: inability to separate deductions before taxes, general ledger lost functionality, W-2 documents sent out of company, no tracking of outstanding checks, no data conversion option, no payroll budgeting option, poor project management from the software provider, unrealistic timeline of training, and mounting costs for continuing use.
The software was especially troublesome for the Fire and EMS departments, which need specific detail for auditing requirements, affecting 20% of full-time employees with that defect alone.
“City staff were told by the sales representative that the newer Kronos Workforce Dimensions would be able to do all of the same functionality as the Legacy Payroll System that is currently in place,” Chief Technology Officer Angela Wright reported. “Once implementation started, that turned out to be incorrect.”
Kronos rep knowledge of the human resource field in general also caused city staff confidence to wane in the company’s ability to provide the service for which they were paid.
“By the end of the testing phase of the project,” Wright advised in a written report to the city’s elected officials, “city staff were not confident in Kronos’ ability to provide a working system without extending the project and doubling the cost.”
City council members voted to pay off the contract and end business with Kronos.