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Consolidated ­construction T&A

A well-known construction company had multiple systems in place to control and monitor the attendance of personnel and/or contractors on each site it operated on. It had a mixture of manual hardcopy attendance registers and multiple card-based access control systems managing turnstiles deployed on each site.

Being a large company, this inconsistency of control created headaches for IT to support and HR to reconcile. The client decided to approach various biometric suppliers looking for a fingerprint biometric solution to overcome all of these shortfalls and consolidate its time and attendance (T&A) solutions.

The IT department was tasked with testing all the proposed solutions from multiple vendors on a test site before making a final decision on technology to deploy. Unfortunately all the technologies examined failed to deliver as poor fingerprint detail, inherent in this industry where hand-intensive tasks are involved, had negative impact on the performance of the systems.

The client then made contact with TimeTronics in search of an alternative technology to meet their expectations. TimeTronics offered the Sagem MorphoAccess VP (Vein Pattern) reader for a trial. The reader excelled and was able to read every single test subject’s fingerprint on site. The IT manager, being sceptical that the reader was undefeated decided to test its vein reading abilities and resorted to covering his fingerprint with a plastic film, to his surprise the reader responded with successful confirmation of transaction.

With this system, each fingerprint enrolled on the system is accompanied by the person’s unique layout of the veins in the shaft of the finger via a Hitachi imaging sensor. With the initial take-on of user templates to be matched/identified, an acquisition is made from the fingerprint template and a feature extraction in retrieved from the vein pattern. With this information the VP reader generates a fusion on two complementary biometrics to create one template.

This combination of finger-vein allows the system to also offer spoof detection for high security environments. TimeTronics was awarded the contract and has been working hand in hand with IT department to deploy units across multiple sites where they are mounted onto turnstiles installed in containers which in turn can be easily transported to new sites. The Morpho units were supplied by Ideco Biometric Security Solutions and the management software was provided by Controlsoft.

TimeTronics has since supplied portable carry cases using Morpho VP readers with embedded HSPA modems suited to smaller sites for timekeeping purposes. This in turn will communicate back to a central server hosted by the client using in-house developed time & attendance software made possible with an SDK supplied by TimeTronics. The portable cases offer additional functionality, they are WiFi hotspots allowing the site manager to connect to corporate VPN and make telephone calls via VoIP.

Controlsoft is a certified Ideco partner supplying MorphoAccess biometric products, software and system solutions.

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