Use Fingerprint Biometrics for Accurate Time and Attendance

If you ever felt like we are currently in the age of information overload, you might be right: last year (in 2011), according to an IDC report on the size of the Digital Universe, the amount of information created and replicated surpassed 1.8 zettabytes (in case you somehow forgot, a zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes) - growing by a factor of nine in just five years! Now part of this data is no doubt of the personal mundane variety, say a tweet of what you ate for lunch or a Facebook post like “girls night out, whoo! xoxo.” But let’s think more in terms of insightful analytics. The most successful organizations are leveraging troves of data to improve their workforce. Positive results include everything from increased productivity, locating inefficiencies, determining proper pricing, reducing payroll, higher security and much more. When companies express a desire to embark on the path towards leveraging workforce analytics, Noah Heinle, Director of Business Operations at Datamatics Management Services, Inc., says there is one fundamental rule that must be built upon: “Collecting validated, accurate data is the cornerstone of this process. It sounds simple enough, but many organizations overlook that having just a handful of errors within thousands of events and transactions can have disastrous results.” One of the best ways to validate data is utilizing biometrics, such as fingerprint time and attendance devices. These devices are fool-proof, so all transactions are clearly from the employee the system says they are from. The most common reason businesses leverage biometrics is to eliminate buddy punching, which is when employees enter time and labor data for one of their co-workers. Nucleus Research, a global provider of IT advisory and research services, concluded that 74 percent of organizations experience payroll losses directly related to buddy punching. While a business can use fingerprint time and attendance clocks to track access and attendance, other modes of data collection can be mixed and matched, depending what makes the most sense for each individual work environment. There are hundreds of solutions: employees who primarily work at a desk can track projects and tasks with a web-based time tracking application; those on the shop floor can record work orders using laser wands and bar codes; employees in the field can record data using a smartphone app or telephonic IVR (Interactive Voice Response) service; workers entering a shipyard can be tracked in and out using a high-powered RFID badge reader (similar to how EZ-Pass works). Once all this data is being collected, the right software system will prevent information overload, allowing your organization unprecedented insight into core business operations. Big data: one of the biggest trends of our time, and one that businesses can easily implement to maximize profits.