2021 may be winding down, but for retailers everywhere, peak season is in full swing. Seasonal workers in warehouses, frontline associates on the sales floor, and store leaders across the continent are working tirelessly to keep everything running smoothly during what’s shaping up to be an unprecedented holiday season.

So when a ransomware attack took down UKG (Kronos), one of the largest human resource management companies in the world, countless store teams were impacted at their most important time of the year. We’re learning that Kronos may be down for several weeks and it could impact the paychecks of countless retail employees everywhere. 

🚨 What this means for retailers

The Kronos outage prevents store employees from being able to clock in/out and effectively record the time for their shifts, meals, and breaks. And without this critical data, HQ partners are not able to pay their hourly store teams. 

To compensate, and to continue to record all punches for hourly employees, many companies have sent out spreadsheets to thousands of stores, asking them to manually fill out their information – which is an onerous task during the busiest time of year. This is no small emergency for the entire workforce. 

⏰ Enter: The Zipline Clock

When Kronos went down, all of us at Zipline knew manual spreadsheets weren’t going to cut it as a solution. Within 24 hours, a #dreamteam of Zipliners across Product, Engineering, Customer Support, Account Management, and Education + Enablement rolled out a new way for Zipline users to track time. 

The Zipline Clock is an easy-to-use tool that can record clock entries directly from the Zipline interface. The Zipline Clock is available on desktop and mobile for organizations, and it doesn’t require any integration to set up (so we can turn it on for users right away!). To ensure that users are able to access all of the Zipline Clock activity, we created a new report, called User Timesheets, that HQ partners can pull directly from the Zipline Reports interface.

If you are a Zipline user, and your organization has been impacted by the Kronos outage and would like to leverage the Zipline Clock, please reach out to your Account Manager for details. 

💪 How Zipline can help retailers

If Covid had a silver lining, it’s that it taught retailers how to quickly pivot based on unforeseen business needs. In the last few days, organizations have had to make dramatic changes to their timesheet and clock processes due to the outage.

The fast-tracking of strategic initiatives is something we are all too familiar with. Kronos going down is a serious change of plan. But for Zipline users, it’s simple to quickly implement multiple initiatives accurately.

At Zipline, we are advocates for every level of your retail organization. We’ve been in the trenches, on the frontlines, and we believe in transforming business through better communication. Agility is what we know best, and we’re proud to help people-driven organizations to triage and tackle any crisis. 

__________

Whether it’s a new POS rollout, Ship From Store policy changes, last-minute promo updates, or pivoting to overcome crucial technology outages, getting the word out is simple and streamlined with Zipline’s communication platform. Learn more today.