The benefits of a biometric time and attendance system practically sell themselves when businesses are looking for efficient ways of keeping track of employee hours and payroll. A biometric system, regardless of modality, helps eliminate time-theft situations, discrepancies based on human error and administrative costs stemming from lost punch cards or forgotten PINs.
A new deployment of biometric time and attendance is also streamlining the sign-in process for a diverse range of employees at an historic country hotel in Leicestershire, United Kingdom. Stapleford Park Country House Hotel has chosen to adopt a biometric system from Bodet Ltd in order to ensure accuracy and reliability in its records. This is no easy task considering the variety of staff positions needing to be tracked including casual and agency recruited employees.
“We have over 150 employees who are working different shifts around the clock,” explains Sally Hatton, Stapleford Park’s payroll administrator. “It makes it very difficult to monitor staff attendance, especially on overnights and when people swap shifts. We used to use time sheets, but this is very time consuming, both for the non-salaried staff and for the payroll teams to enter the data into the system. A further issue is with agency staff who have to send their timesheets to the agency which means the only record of their attendance is when we get an invoice. We really needed a system that was easy for staff to use, foolproof and would provide reliable attendance data for all staff.”
The Bodet system selected by Stapleford Park is fingerprint based and, according to Hatton, the hotel staff were quick to accept the biometric punch-in method. A quick learning curve when new technology is brought into a work environment is ideal, but in this scenario the convenience acceptance rate is dwarfed by the resulting efficiency.
“It also saves so much management time,” says Hatton. “Neither we nor the duty managers have to spend time chasing people for time sheets, and as the data is entered automatically it eliminates the risk of manual entry errors. The only manual entries are to cover absences such as sickness and holidays or to amend shift changes. We can now generate meaningful management reports at the push of a button which can identify trends at an early stage. For example, if staff stay longer than their nominated shift, then we can see if there are problems that need addressing or areas where we need additional staff and plan future manning schedules with greater accuracy.”
Fingerprint biometrics aren’t the only modality that works for time and attendance. At Winthrop University in the United States, iris scanners have been adopted to keep track of students.
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September 22, 2014 – by Peter B. Counter
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