Biometric Time & Attendance

Pepsi is a global soft drink’s manufacturer. This case study corresponds to Pepsi’s beverage manufacturing plants, that selected Touch N Go (Fingerprint Identification Solution) to integrate with their Workforce Management System.

This particular beverage manufacturing plant of Pepsi had been using traditional password-based attendance management system for a long time. The employees had been provided usernames and passwords which they were using for logging-in to their workstations as well as for marking their attendance.

Many employees were using the old register-based attendance marking process. This meant that such employees would come in the morning and sign in the attendance register.

Such a system worked well initially. But then the plant management observed certain drawbacks. With the attendance being marked in a paper register as well as online, the employee supervisors had to manually reconcile the attendance data every month. As the staff count grew so did the amount of data. The time spent by supervisors ballooned and reached almost 40 hours per week (4 supervisors spending 10 hours per week) simply in attendance data reconciliation. As this effort was purely manual, the attendance data remained error-prone. As a result, despite the hard work of the supervisors, plant management started hearing regular complaints about irregularities in payroll disbursements.

To add to the employee productivity issues, as the staff strength grew, time spent by employees in the queue to mark their attendance manually in the register, started increasing. When the cumulative time lost for employees started reaching hours due to the long queues, management sat up and took notice of it.

The plant management’s problems did not end at the attendance related issues. Another problem surfaced with regards to the use of username and password to login into the systems. Older employees were frequently having issues logging in using mouse and keyboard. Forgotten password and password reset requests started consuming a lot of productive time of the employees.

Problems with login and attendance reached such a point that the plant management felt that it would start affecting the production targets. Management then started scouting for solutions which could rectify the problems at the plant quickly and with a low learning curve. It was at this juncture that the management at Pepsi’s beverage management plant decided to go in for Bayometric’s Fingerprint based Biometric Identification Solution (Touch N Go).

Biometric implementation experts from Bayometric met with the plant management to understand the areas they had issues in. After conducting multiple sessions with the plant management, the Bayometric team understood the areas where the systemic issues existed.

Primary issue was identified as the manual register-based punch-in procedure. At the same time the use of usernames and passwords, and the associated problems of forgot and reset passwords, was the second issue which was wasting valuable employee time. Bayometric decided to implement a single comprehensive solution to address both the problem areas with Bayometric’s Fingerprint-based Biometric Identification Solution (Touch N Go).

Bayometric’s Touch N Go has the unique advantage that it requires just 4 lines of code to integrate fingerprint recognition with the client’s time and attendance application. This implied that the time needed to develop and test the integration was just 1 day. In addition, the installation of Touch N Go was also very quick. The plant management at Pepsi was very impressed with the fast development and installation aspect as it meant minimum disruption to their production schedule.

Bayometric’s Fingerprint-based Biometric Identification Solution (Touch N Go) was integrated into the plant’s Time and Attendance, Human Resources and Payroll systems. This meant seamless integration with SAP, SAP-HR and in-house payroll management software at the plant. The implementation team of Bayometric achieved these integrations with such a disparate set of systems with ease using .NET libraries. SQL Server database was setup at the backend to store the captured records.

With the use of Bayometric’s fingerprint-based biometric identification solution, the username/password based login mechanism for workstations was done away with.

For attendance, the employees at the plant now had to simply present their fingerprints for authentication on scanners placed at entry and exit points of the plant. When the employees would reach their workstation, then all they would need to do for logging-in would again be just the swipe of their fingers. This smoothened the process of both attendance management and system\workstation login. The familiarity of the plant’s employees with fingerprint recognition based authentication meant that they did not require much user training.

Touch N Go Fingerprint-based Biometric Identification Solution was implemented for both contractual as well as regular employees. In addition, both overtime management and shift management were brought under this solution. The integration of Touch N Go with HR and Payroll departments implied that these departments could now see the employee attendance data at the click of a button.

Benefits of Bayometric’s Touch N Go Fingerprint-based Biometric Identification Solution were felt immediately by the plant management in terms of improved employee productivity.

Here are a few metrics which show a dramatic reduction in time and effort wastage after the installation of Touch N Go –

• The time spent on manual reconciliation of attendance records by the supervisors fell from 40 man hours per week to zero. This is a direct saving of 40 man hours of supervisory time per week. Instead of manual reconciliation of employee working hours, generation of attendance information for payroll became a matter of just printing the right reports.
• Average time spent by employee in logging-in to their systems fell from 2 min to 1 second. Just a swipe of their fingerprint was now enough.
• Average number of forgotten password requests per month fell from 20 to zero. With fingerprint-based logins there were no passwords involved. Password resets became history.
• Time saved per employee per month was approximately 15 man hours.
• There were no long queues for attendance any more. The cumulative employee time spent per month for marking attendance fell from hours to minutes.
• Time lost due to buddy punching as well as time thefts came down to zero.

With Touch N Go, the plant management observed that the improved login and attendance management processes became error-free.

Huge productivity improvements were noticed in the Payroll department. Prior to Touch N Go implementation, the Payroll department would spend hours in manually going through attendance information including overtime and shift related punch-in data. With Touch N Go solution attendance database was integrated with payroll systems. As a result, payroll calculations were reduced to simply firing of the correct report.

Whether it was attendance management, shift or overtime management, payroll calculations became near-instant. Automation also meant that payroll errors became history. Touch N Go’s integration with Payroll department effectively ensured that the correct employee would get the correct pay.

Attendance tracking by the HR at the plant also became automated and error-free with the integration of Touch N Go solution with SAP-HR system.

The plant management of Pepsi is so satisfied and happy with Bayometric’s Touch N Go Fingerprint-based Biometric Identification Solution that they plan to extend it to other manufacturing departments such as Quality Assurance, Sampling and Product movement as well.

When asked about the advantages of using Touch N Go, we received several words of praise and encourage from the Pepsi plant management. Here are some of the responses –

“Easy to use, easy to configure, hardware is small and ergonomical.
“Support from you guys(Bayometric) is excellent”
“Documentation (of Touch N Go) is easy to use and fast.”
“Use of the equipment (installed with Touch N Go) is logical and natural.”

And above all we received this simple but accurate thumbs up statement from one of the key persons in plant management. When asked about what would he suggest to someone when asked about Touch N Go, he replied with “Use Touch N Go! It’s easy!”.