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Taking time and attendance offsite

It is said that innovation is the result of an idea on a Post-It, pushed by a forward-thinking leader, backed by a driven team, with their eye on the plan. This could not be any truer for Powell Tronics, which has once again been able to turn an idea into a product. Powell Tronics launched its first venture into the mobile clocking arena at Securex South Africa in May earlier this year and are very happy with the interest the market has taken into the product.

Having been a strong promoter of electronic time and attendance (T&A) systems for workforce time management, Powell Tronics has over the years been requested to cater for the time management of employees that work outside of the norm of walking into a building and clocking at a designated reader. Organisations with offsite personnel, namely sales staff or field workers, as well as staff that work irregular hours and thus do not always have access to their designated readers, have over the years always had to compromise with the efficiency of their time management systems.

It is from this inefficiency in the solution that the idea of catering for mobile clocking in the ATOM development roadmap was born and added to the Post-It notes under the 'Big Picture Plan' column.

Using hardware that has proven successful with two other Powell Tronics bespoke solutions, PT-Guest Visitor Management and PT-RollCall, a portable biometric attendance register especially developed for the education sector, ATOM Mobile offers the market a practical and accurate means of enrolling employees and capturing their clockings without having to be inside an office or building.

ATOM’s use of Web and network technology allows for all employee details to be accurately captured by HR back at head office, but then allow for the ability to later remotely capture their biometric templates by a site manager out in the field using the simple user interface of the handheld scanner.

The scanner’s onboard database caters for the need to be able to capture time and attendance information without the restraint of having to make the sometimes impractical journey to an office environment by field staff or to be in range of the organisation’s network. This offline feature, coupled with the one touch enabled quick clocking modes, bridges an age old gap in the time and attendance field.

Site managers or supervisors can quickly and easily clock their staff in as they arrive on site, clock them off as they leave site at the end of the shift and when the day is over, bring the scanner to the site office and dock it for power charging while it automatically connects to the network and uploads the day’s information back to the main ATOM system for reporting and payroll purposes.

Further development on ATOM Mobile for the Morpho Tablet as well as bespoke smartphone applications is already in progress and set to be released into the market in the first quarter of 2016.

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