IBM & Kronos extend global partnership to India

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Kronos , a 625 million dollar Masachussets based software company today announced the extension of its global partnership with IBM to India. They launched  Kronos for Manufacturing (Workforce Central^® Version 6.0), a comprehensive offering of software and services designed to maximize productivity and achieve operational excellence in manufacturing units.

According to Anil Menon, VP, Channels, Marketing & Ecosystem, Software Group, IBM India/ SA, "Kronos has been a premium ISV (Independent Software Vendor) partner of IBM and we are now beginning to leverage this relationship in India. Kronos for Manufacturing is available on IBM middleware technology and this announcement is yet another representative of IBM's leadership position as the "innovator's innovator"."

"After 101 successive quarters of growth, and profitability at 10 to 15% per year, we're expecting the Indian market to enable them to outperform past growth records. While Kronos has solutions for almost every industry, the growth sectors identified for India are Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail and IT services. Specifically with respect to manufacturing, with the launch today, we have identified Automotives, Life Science and Oil and Gas as the growth drivers. From working with leading manufacturers across the globe, we understood it was imperative to introduce an industry-specific solution to help them overcome the industry-specific obstacles they are facing related to the workforce," said Gregg Gordon, Global Practice Director for manufacturing at Kronos.

 

Globally the customers for Kronos for Manufacturing are Mitsubishi, Arvin Meritor, Freescale semi-conductors and Volkswagen, to name a few. Confidentiality agreements prevent the company from naming several Fortune 500 customers. By focusing on workforce performance optimization, Kronos for Manufacturing has established a leadership role for the next important source of performance gains for the global manufacturing industry.

Considering that Indian companies have over the years developed a  number of ingenuos solutions themselves, Gregg is confident that the Kronos view will bring about a paradigm shift in the way manufacturing companies view their workforce productivity measures. The Kronos for Manufacturing solution is ahead of the current practices. In the past, manufacturers were able to differentiate themselves by controlling costs and increasing productivity through the use of technologies such as ERP, SCM, and CRM. Now that these technologies have become commonplace, manufacturers are looking for new ways to remain competitive. Further complicating this challenge are specific obstacles such as a shortage of skilled workers and offshore competitors.  We hope to address real problems of manufacturers like machine delays, material delays, idle time, absenteeism, scheduling to demand, effective use of transportation.

Kronos was listed on NASDAQ till June 2007. They delisted subsequently when Helman and Friedmann took up a private equity stake in the company. They have 3400 employees worldwide and are looking at a huge leap in their Indian workforce from the current 70 in this fiscal.

 

Sourced From: Wowfactor Communications