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Stop buddy clocking

Beige Holdings is a contract manufacturer and distributor of cosmetics, household products and allied bath and body care products for South African and international markets. The group’s foundations were established when entrepreneurs Dennis Heyman and Syd Rogers formed Beige Pharmaceuticals in 1974. The business then focused on the contract manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and later diversified.

Although the company is not what you would call a global enterprise, it does employ a considerable sized workforce. For this reason, it needed to update its time and attendance solution at one of its sites to something more robust and more reliable.

Beige Holdings encountered numerous problems with its old card clock-in system. Employees were constantly losing their access cards, which had to be replaced at a cost to the company, not to mention the frequent occurrence of buddy-clocking. Furthermore, the time and attendance system was so ineffectual that the company often found itself reverting back to manual time attendance register.

Beige Holdings decided to upgrade this solution after a previous successful biometric implementation at one of its other sites. In fact, the company’s head office suggested it go through with the upgrade.

As can be expected with a time and attendance system upgrade, the main benefactor is HR, which is now able to accurately monitor the hours put in by employees.

Biometrics integrated into ClockWatch

The proposed solution consisted of numerous Sagem MA500 biometric scanners linked to a network. These scanners would relay information to a ClockWatch system where data would be saved for salary payments.

No technical problems were experienced with the installation; all went exactly as planned except for the power supplies in three of the Sagem readers that had to be replaced.

Once the solution was up and running, management was happy and the company was saving thousands. However, the workforce was less than happy as they realised there was no way to get paid for work they did not do, nor could they get their friends to clock them into work.

The project was put out to tender, with Timewatch winning the bid. Timewatch was already working on other Beige Holdings sites. The entire implementation was handled by Timewatch, which was given a deadline when the installation needed to be complete; 30 days later all employees had to be switched over to the new system.

Beige Holdings was happy with the project as the rewards promised were delivered. A spokesperson did mention that the company had to develop its own reporting techniques as the ones that came with the system were too complex.

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