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| (by Mr. Thiang Cheong-Yew, SmartSys Solutions Pte Ltd) |
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| With the widespread and growing use of fingerprint time clock device at workplace in place of traditional punch card machine, the realization of costs and benefits are now changing the way executives think of fingerprint technology. Although time and attendance system is not a business-critical system, it is considered as an important system for organizations that rely heavily on time clock data for calculation of workers’ hourly wages or overtime pay. |
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| The success or failure of implementing FingerTec solutions is very much depending on the person who’s assigned to assume the administrative role in managing the process and the system. |
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From our past implementation experiences, the system can have some impacts on administrator workload or create user discontent if it is badly managed. Administrator may spend more timeanswering user’s queries or solving the day-to-day clocking issues. In factory environment, workers’ hourly wages and overtime hours are based on their actual working hours. In this respect, the time attendance system is deemed to be operationally important from human resource department’s perspective.
We used to come across a common issue reported by many customers usually a few weeks after the terminals are put in place for clocking. Customers claimed that some users data were not captured in the attendance reports and that the scanning process was sometimes difficult. It sounded like a valid complaint since it could be a handful of users whose fingerprints somehow are not detected even after three scans. Having gone through several cases of investigations, I would like to share some interesting findings and my personal ways of dealing with these kind of issues. |
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| Handling of Clocking Problem |
| An attendance record book should be provided at the reception counter or at the time clock location. Users, who encounter fingerprint scanning difficulty, record their time and reason, which later can be entered into the system manually. For genuine cases of difficult-to-read fingerprint, reenrollment has to be done. Apart from fingerprint, administrator also has to assign passwords to users who have difficulty to clock. Having fingerprint, password and attendance record book has proven to be an effective way to prevent any user who is late or absent for work using fingerprint clocking system problem as an excuse. This might sounds juvenile but it often happens in colleges or educational institutions. Some students make it a point to challenge new technology or system process by attacking its weaknesses. |
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| Knowledge of System Administrator |
| System administrators must be equipped with sufficient system knowledge to minimize scanning issue caused by improper handling of system functions. The following scenarios can create unnecessary confusion and inconvenience to users as users’ fingerprints might be overwritten accidentally as a result of unawareness of fingerprint administrative process. For sites with multiple FingerTec terminals, system administrators must understand the logic of fingerprint replication functions for copying user records including fingerprint templates and card IDs in order for users to clock from any terminals.
Managing database synchronization between terminal-and-PC and PC-to-terminal requires a systematic process to keep user records in-sync and updated at all times. Inappropriate download and upload handling and uncoordinated enrollment processes can cause the newly registered fingerprint templates to be overwritten. For example, if an administrator enrolls user fingerprints into multiple time clock machines, there is a high possibility some fingerprint templates being overwritten and even lost if it’s carried out unplanned. |
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| System Administrator Training |
| Although system administrator may read documentations provided to learn about software and hardware functions, the learning curve seems to take longer. Very often, system manual is helpful only if the administrator has already been on the job for some time coupled with some system experiences. For fresh administrators, the trainer is playing an important role to help administrators to jumpstart the fingerprint application process. Based on my personal experience, teaching administrators on the processes and related system functions will shorten administrator’s learning curve. As an example, what should an administrator do if a user joins the organization? There are a series of system functions, such as add user record, enroll fingerprint and replicate the fingerprint from one terminal to the other. Other processes are handling resigned employees, managing daily attendance downloading process and etc. By guiding the administrator on the processes, they would learn faster and know what to do best. |
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| Clocking Assistance |
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| During the initial deployment, users need to be guided and trained in the proper ways of positioning and placing a finger for scanning. This will help minimize the failure rate and numbers of retries. Duplicate user ID also commonly happens during the initial rollout whereby the wrong user ID is entered for another user or placement of fingerprint is not at the centre and the fingerprint is not placed flag-down position. If the deployment site consists of more than one hundred of workers per shift, the best solution is to have a spare machine or USB fingerprint scanner that can rectify the scanning issues immediately.
In summary, the critical success factors for implementation of fingerprint time and attendance solutions are very much dependant on how fast administrator can master the system. It requires a dedicated administrator’s time during the initial deployment to ensure smooth implementation or switching over from manual punch card system to PC-based fingerprint system. |
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| Thiang Cheong-Yew is an employee for SmartSys Solutions Pte Ltd, Singapore, has been working with FingerTec system since 2005 and is very knowledgeable about FingerTec systems. |
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