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Enterprise does away with cards

Project scope

1700 employees all processed through 13 Sagem MorphoAccess Biometric Terminals. All staff successfully enrolled. These terminals are used to control access at the main entrance to the site and control access to six factories on the site. The readers also record time and attendance data of employees.

The history

The Enterprise Germiston Manufacturing facility consists of six factories spanning 15 000 m² under roof, set on 6,5 hectares of ground. The facility has over 1700 employees working in the various factories, and required a secure and accurate way of recording attendance of employees, as well as controlling access to the site.

The previous card-based system was susceptible to fraud and abuse. There was also a high cost of maintenance associated with the card-based system due to lost and damaged cards.

In addition it was not desirable to allow cards to be used in such an hygienically critical plant as this.

The solution

13 Sagem MorphoAccess readers are used for access control and time and attendance. Five of these readers are the MA300 type which have the capacity to store 96 000 fingerprints.

These readers are distributed throughout the site and are used in some cases for access control, and others time and attendance or both.

The biometric system is managed by Sagem's MEMS (Morpho Enrolment and Management System), and runs on an Ethernet network.

The biometric system is integrated into Time Manager T&A software, which is in turn integrated into VIP Payroll. This ensures seamless integration of the whole employee management process from Access Control to T&A to HR to Payroll.

The goal

To eliminate time and attendance fraud, reduce HR and payroll administration and improve general security.

Obstacles en route to a final solution

Enterprise Germiston is a very large site with a large staff complement. A system was required that would operate effectively on a fingerprint only (identification or 1:many) basis, and process a large workforce at very high speed. The typical procurement process required that several systems be tested and evaluated, however only one product (Sagem) seemed to be able to provide the required performance when using fingerprint only. Therefore, comparative products had to be evaluated on a 1:1 verification basis.

Due to the manufacturing environment with very high humidity and moisture content in some of the factories, as well as the low temperatures in other sections, a biometric solution was needed which would operate in these varying conditions.

The result

The system went live one week ahead of schedule. The system has performed even better than expected and the stability of the system has been excellent, with no down-time on the biometric readers.

Fact file

System Integrators/installers: FutureTech, Yuri Denton or Johan Knox, 033 330 8152, futuretech@absamail.co.za

Sagem Biometric products, distributed by Ideco Group, Gary Jones, 011 840 7800, info@ideco.co.za

Enterprise Foods, Erlo Bossert, 011 825 1144, erlo.bossert@tigerbrands.com

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