Digital revolution…yes! I can’t help but restate the term that we have been hearing so often – that the only good thing that came from the current COVID-19 crisis is the digital revolution. The digital revolution has become overused in the last few months. As we see the adoption of digital means to simplify several small but complex daily problems, one of the areas that a significantly large population goes through but seldom receives due attention is the staff time entry. While it seems to be the last priority for executives, digital revolution is perhaps one of the biggest pain areas for payroll and time administrators. At the end of the day, we must understand that time is money and money is time well utilized.

Stop! Don’t touch! Going touchless on time entry, the need of the hour

Challenges

The following are the key areas most administrators spend a significant time on:

• Capturing time accurately
• Capturing the location where employee punches the ‘in’ time, also known as ‘geo-fencing’
• Allocating the time to multiple job functions that each staff performs
• Enforcing discipline in punches
• Avoiding proxy-punching or buddy punching
• Distributing the correct pay rates based on the job function each employee performs during different time intervals

COVID-19 has complicated things further. Touch has become taboo. Can’t touch your face, can’t touch groceries, and can’t touch another human. Reminds me of the 90’s MC Hammer song “You can’t touch this”. Let alone touching an object on the wall (time clock) that hundreds of fellow humans touch for time entry.

A simple and an easy-to-use solution that addresses the above problems is Touchless Time Entry Solution built for Oracle HCM Cloud.

Putting it to work

The base premise for this solution is the fact that a significantly large number of human population possess a smartphone. That said, there are people reluctant to accept a device that can take over their sense of self-satisfaction with a smartphone. The solution needs to cater to both factions and work seamlessly. Our touchless solution enables time entry with the following key features:

• Mobile time entry through a handheld smartphone
• Time entry through a wall-installed device
• Authentication through face-recognition, fingerprint, and password entry
• Capture the location through a QR code unique to each location that changes every 30 seconds
• Configurable punches such as ‘In’, ‘Break’, ‘Meal’, and ‘Out’
• Validation with work schedule to ensure employee punches in at their designated location
• Mapping of pay rate based on multiple parameters such as location and job code etc.
• Enforcement of punch discipline such as alerts, missing punch validations, and late punches, etc.

Where does it work?

This solution is particularly useful when large number of employees need to clock in-time in different places within your premises. Good examples would be hotels/resorts, golf courses, country clubs, casinos, manufacturing plants, research labs, and retail/ departmental stores etc.

Sending a strong message – we care!

It is easy for anyone to say ‘we care’ but when the action justifies the intention, it speaks volumes. This solution would enable the organizations to send out a strong message to both employees and customers that they care for their safety and are creating a safe environment in times of COVID-19.

Conclusion

This solution will help reduce the effort that administrators spend on the time entry, approvals, corrections, allocations, and packaging data for payroll. It helps significantly reduce the heartburn associated with time administration and enables staff do more value-adding activities. The Touchless Time Entry Solution helps businesses save significant costs. Do less, save more!