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Getting to grips with time and attendance problems

Much Asphalt is a manufacturer of asphalt on the East Rand and was experiencing serious problems with keeping reliable T&A records in a harsh environment.

Keeping track of the in- and out-clockings of a large workforce is vital to any business and the associated problems that go with it are nothing new, especially in the case of car-based T&A systems.

“Here at Much Asphalt,” says Philip Nel, “we were paying an expensive penalty for inaccurate manual admin work and bogus clockings which resulted in a serious abuse of overtime claims and the associated costs thereof.

“In order to operate an efficient T&A system for the payment of wages, one must have a system that is both accurate and reliable and can make clocking information available at the ‘push of a button’.”

The management team at Much Asphalt very soon realised that it had a costly problem on its hands and urgently needed a T&A system that would give better control over the day-to-day clockings of the workforce, and reduce the costly and unnecessary errors resulting from a manual system that is too susceptible to abuse.

At the same time the T&A system of choice needed to be capable of rendering quick and easy access to accurate records as well as generating a variety of reports for different scenarios. And so the search began.

The solution

“The question was,” says Nel, “where do we go to find a system that would resolve all our problems and satisfy our specific requirements within our budget allocation?

“To start with we approached a number of companies that specialised in access control and time and attendance solutions, but one company in particular, Timewatch Systems stood out, not only because it had a very flexible T&A software package that could be tailored to meet our specific requirements, but also because it offered us Sagem biometric fingerprint readers as clocking terminals.

“At first we were somewhat sceptical as to whether or not fingerprint readers would be able to operate efficiently in the harsh conditions encountered in our asphalt manufacturing plant, but once the Sagem readers were demonstrated to us on site, we were sold.

“Timewatch’s totally integrated biometric system as a whole really impressed us so we took the plunge and installed, says Nel. The rest is history and we have never looked back. Sagem’s MorphoAccess readers have raised the level of clocking speed and accuracy to new heights and the level of convenience and integrity they have introduced into our T&A system is immense.

“The end result has exceeded all expectations. We now have a biometric time and attendance system that is both fast and reliable and gives us better control over individual clockings, eliminates bogus clockings and facilitates much better handling of clocking records which are readily accessible. We are able to generate a number of very useful reports as and when required.

“All in all we have ended up with a really satisfactory solution which is expandable and will meet our requirements well into the future, and most importantly, it is saving us a small fortune in unwarranted wages.”

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