Under the best scenario, you might start using Workforce Record Manager (WRM) right away to copy locked payroll data to the archive database. And each time payroll is processed another pay period would be copied to the archive. No data is removed from the production database until much later on. The goal is to keep Kronos Workforce Central product data your users are likely to need to access within the production database. User access to the archive database should be limited and infrequent.
Some people
call this a
"Best Practice"
The key users of Kronos Workforce Central products are managers and the timeframe of data they need to access typically goes back a year. Of course, you might have different requirements at your company. So as a general rule, you can probably wait about a year before starting to purge data from the production database using Record Manager. But what if your workload prevents you from starting to use WRM right away? How long can you afford to wait?
One approach is to wait until the amount of time it takes to do database maintenance exceeds the database maintenance time window. Keep in mind, customers typically rollout Kronos Workforce Central products incrementally. That is, they start with a few sites and eventually rollout everything to the entire enterprise. As such, there is far less data initially so database maintenance is probably not that time consuming. The amount of time it takes to do the maintenance often becomes a concern when Workforce Central products get used by most or the entire enterprise. And then, the use of Workforce Record Manager is seen itself as a database maintenance activity which imposes further pressure on the database maintenance time window.
Unfortunately, some customers, particularly those with small database maintenance windows, have waited years before archiving data and have found that WRM has to run around the clock for months at a time to copy data from the production to the archive database and then purge the copied data from the production database. In particular, when you start to find key database tables, for example, the PUNCHEVENT, TIMESHEETITEM, and WFCTOTAL tables, having tens of millions of rows, it is definitely time to start using Workforce Record Manager.
Nonetheless, it is recommended that you do not wait that long. If you cannot start using Kronos Workforce Record Manager right away, it is recommended that you do start when you have reached the point where your production database contains all the Workforce Central data your managers are likely to need to access, typically about a year of data.