Time and attendance, or Workforce Management, systems are used by companies of all sizes to record working hours of employees primarily in order to pay their wages. Some companies have a requirement to record the number of hours spent on specific tasks in order to cost jobs accurately. This is referred to as job costing.
A workforce management system enables an employer to have full control of all employees working hours right at an operators fingertips. It is also invaluable for ensuring compliance with labour regulations regarding proof of attendance.
Companies with large employee numbers might need to install several clocking points in order to speed up the process of getting all employees to clock in or out quickly or to record activity in dispersed locations.
Depending on the supplier, identification method and number of clocking points required, prices vary widely.
A Workforce Management System protects a company from payroll fraud and provides both employer and employees with confidence in the accuracy of their wage payments.
Contents |
Manual systems rely on highly skilled people laboriously adding up paper cards which have times stamped onto them using a time stamping machine such as the Bundy Clock. Time stamping machines have been in use for over a century and may still be bought new today for a few hundred Euro.
Automated Workforce Management Systems can use electronic tags, barcode badges, magnetic stripe cards, biometrics (hand, fingerprint, or facial), and touch screens[1] in place of paper cards which employees touch or swipe to identify themselves and record their working hours as they enter or leave the work area. The recorded information is then ideally automatically transferred to a computer for processing although some systems require an operator to physically transfer data from the clocking point to the computer using a portable memory device. The computer may then be employed to perform all the necessary calculations to generate employee timesheets which are used to calculate the employees' wages.
CipherLab Co Ltd, based in Taiwan, released in 1989 its first time clock data terminal.[2]
One of the first computerised workforce management systems was the Weeney Clocker produced by a company called Baur Automation in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was available from 1992 to about 2005.