It is said that April showers bring May flowers, but our latest UKG Ready™ enhancements have already bloomed. And while spring is officially upon us, make sure you take the time to see the new enhancements we have in store for you this season. Brad Nycz, UKG Ready suite executive relationship director and former customer, has chosen to highlight 11 upcoming enhancements from our April release. Excited to see what these enhancements have in store for you? Read on to find out!
Suite Experience
Simplifying Custom Form Configuration – Creating custom forms has always been a challenging task for Kate. She can never configure the form exactly how she needs it. That’s why she’s excited for this latest enhancement of custom form configuration. Kate now will be able to adjust the size of the fields using her mouse, drag and drop the field wherever she wants, and even determine what the field type is before adding it in. What used to be extremely time-consuming will be simplified to a few clicks. The best part? Soon Kate can easily configure the form to her exact needs.
Where to find it: Cross Product Release Notes
Who will use it: Admins
SMS Opt-in Compliance – Amir recently realized that he hasn’t received any SMS communications from his organization lately, and he wondered why. Here at UKG, we want to ensure your organization remains compliant, and one of the ways we are doing that is by updating our SMS settings; in order to receive SMS messages, employees must opt in. Organizations can leverage SMS communication with our marketplace partner Twilio. In the past, users like Amir didn’t need to opt in to receive SMS communications. To opt in, Amir must navigate to his Profile, update his contact information,* and then check off the SMS button.
Where to find it: Cross Product Release Notes
Who will use it: Employees
*Note: In order to leverage SMS communication, employees must have a valid phone number and country code listed in the system.
HR and Payroll
Payroll Processing Improvements – Colin works at a smaller organization and wears many hats, one of which is that of payroll admin for the time being. After he took on this role, he realized there were several things holding him up that could be easily improved. When he took a look at the notes for the April release, he was blown away. There are several enhancements listed that will make his day-to-day tasks easier. Now he will be able to:
- Opt out of top ABA and bottom ABA fields on bank account set up — something his organization didn’t require for a while.
- See the system minimum wage report. His organization doesn’t leverage the TLM module, which previously was a requirement for seeing this report.
- Print base compensation on a payroll statement.
- These updates are going to streamline his tasks and give back time in his day to balance the other hats he must wear and tasks he must complete.
Where to find it: Payroll Release Notes
Who will use it: Payroll Admins
Offer Letters: Additional Security and System Notifications – Marisol works in recruitment at her organization. Recently, she’s been running into a couple of issues with offer letters. The first is that anyone with offer letter security permissions can see the offer letters in the system. Now, Marisol wasn’t saying that employees at her organization were actually going in and viewing others’ offer letters, but she’s happy to know additional security measures have been put in the April release. With this latest security enhancement, Marisol can ensure those in her organization with offer letter access can view only those offer letters directly tied to them.
The second issue Marisol was running into was offer letter system notifications. Stakeholders in the hiring process were not always aware of the status of offer letters. There was no automatic way to update them; it was up to Marisol to update them manually. With the newest enhancement for offer letter system notifications, Marisol will be able to configure a notification to automatically be sent when an offer letter is assigned, accepted, declined, or expired.
Where to find it: HR Release Notes
Who will use it: Admins, Managers, and Recruiters
Copy Compensation Cycle – Jaylen cannot tell you exactly how many hours he spent creating and setting up compensation cycles last year, but it was a lot. It most certainly is his least-favorite job responsibility. That’s why he was ecstatic to find out about the Copy Compensation Cycle enhancement coming in the April release. Now he will be able to quickly and easily set up cycles that are cloned from the year prior instead of starting from scratch and building out all of them. Not only will this make it faster for him to set up compensation cycles, but it also will make it easier for him to manage multiple cycles with similar information.
Where to find it: HR Release Notes
Who will use it: HR Admins
Prorated Visibility – Yvette is in the process of approving compensation proposals for her team. She has had several new hires, transfers, and promotions this year so a handful of people are eligible for a prorated increase this year. She now will be able to view the prorated amounts and percentage fields in her To Do Items. This will make it easy for her to look at her team’s budget and see what each employee will receive for compensation next year. And since she’ll be approving the proposals via her To Do items, the prorated amounts will display in the pop-up when she is approving them.
Where to find it: HR Release Notes
Who will use it: HR Admins and Managers
Workforce Management
Manager Replacement Functionality: Move To Do Items – The manager replacement functionality has been Simone’s favorite enhancement this past year. As she is an HR admin, it makes her job so much easier, but while the functionality is great, there still were some areas of improvement she wanted to see. In this release, she’s excited that she will now be able to move all outstanding To Do Items from one manager to another. Simone now will easily complete manager replacements and ensure that no outstanding items from the previous manager’s team are missed.
Where to find it: TLM Release Notes
Who will use it: Admins
Piecework at the Clock – Alexander works across multiple departmenets at his organization throughout his day and utlizies an InTouch clock to submit piecework counts. Unfortunately up until this point he was limited to only being allowed to submit counts; there was no way to identify what department he was working on for each part of his shift. With this latest enhancement, Alexander can submit his cost center information which easily allows him to track counts for each cost center he was working in that day.
Where to find it: TLM Release Notes
Who will use it: Employees and Operations
Prioritize Optimizations – The Scheduler automatic shift assignment is Dante’s favorite thing about the UKG Ready product. Automatic shift assignment saves Dante plenty of time when it comes to getting the next month’s schedule out the door. And this feature is only getting better! Now Dante will be able to prioritize the weight of the criteria when automatically assigning shifts. This means that if managers want to assign based on schedule preferences, seniority, or even skill level, they can. Soon Dante can efficiently use automatic shift assignment and better align employee shifts.
Where to find it: Scheduler Release Notes
Who will use it: Operations – Scheduling
Base Compensation Visibility – Naomi works with Dante in the scheduling department. She has been looking to fill a couple of open shifts for next weekend, and she’s narrowed it down to two qualified individuals who have expressed interest in picking up additional shifts. With this enhancement, Naomi will be able to see both employees’ base compensation and just how much it would cost the organization to have each employee fill the shift. This will give her visibility to fill the shift while staying on budget.
Where to find it: Scheduler Release Notes
Who will use it: Operations – Scheduling
Appendix
- For 24/7 access to release notes and user guides for the classic user experience, log in to your account and go to Our Company > Download Documents > Service Provider Documents within the UKG Ready solution.
- For 24/7 access to release notes and user guides, log in to your account and go to My Info > My Learning > Product Documentation within the UKG Ready solution.
- Bookmark the Release Readiness page in UKG Kronos Community for everything you need to learn about what’s new and what’s next.
- Visit the Announcements group in UKG Kronos Community to stay up to date on published release notes and future release dates.
- Alert groups provide you with important notifications on critical system updates. Not sure which alert group to join? Click here.
- To share ideas about new UKG Ready features or enhancements and to vote on fellow users’ ideas, log in to UKG Kronos Community and visit the Ideas section.
- Review our technical highlights for easy reference to key release notes.
The content from this blog post is courtesy of Brad Nycz, customer success manager and former UKG customer. Brad identifies key features in recent releases, and Amanda translates them into story form. We hope you enjoyed this article on release 80! Please stay tuned for more real-life, relatable examples about UKG Ready features in action.