Time & Attendance and Patient Identification

Located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ruashi Mining is a familiar name in central African mining industry. The company has 1300+ strong workforce, helping it produce 38,000 tons of Copper and 4,400 tons of Cobalt per annum. Ruashi Mining were able to automate employee time and attendance as well as patient identification with fingerprints using Touch N Go.

Ruashi Mining had been using a paper-based manual employee clock in system to track their time and attendance at work. The employees would come at work and sign the attendance book mentioning the time of arrival. The same processed repeated while leaving. As is the case with paper based manual employee time and attendance, human errors and omissions were quite frequent. Paper based manual recording of employee time and attendance has always been prone to manipulation and time theft and Ruashi Mining was not an exception.

Along with potential loopholes of time theft, time wasted in this process was significantly high as there were many employees waiting at the same time to log their attendance data. Arriving at a particular time, employees ended up waiting in queues just to mark their attendance. Time taken to mark time and attendance also started to inflate as the numbers of employees grew, to an extent that it started affecting payroll and work time.

However, inefficiency of employee attendance process was not the only thing company was concerned about. Ruashi Mining provides healthcare facilities for its employees and their families. Identification of employees who visited the doctors was also managed using paper based manual method. This manual system had many loopholes, which were being exploited by some employees.

Unauthorized and ineligible individuals (e.g. employees’ friends / relatives) were suspected to avail benefits of company’s healthcare program using identity of an eligible employee. Since there was no trustworthy system to verify identity of a patient, company was losing money due to this fraudulent activity. Other than availing healthcare services in the name of eligible employees, time taken to process a patent at the clinic was very high. Employees would often take time off saying that they were going to see the doctor but there was no way of tracing this.

Ruashi Mining was struggling at multiple fronts. Attendance fraud was an issue, healthcare fraud was making company bleed money on employee healthcare services and company was paying money for time away from work. Managing and processing data recorded on paper was time consuming and taking a lot of manual efforts to process attendance and payroll. Payroll inefficiencies were evident as manual recording and processing of employee data included several inefficiencies.

Flaws of manual time tracking of employee attendance as well as company healthcare services did not go unnoticed from the management as they had already started company lose money.

After a detailed analysis of inefficiencies in employee time tracking and patient identification, the management eventually acknowledged that the company was in grave need of an automated and dependable employee clock in system as well as a patient identification system. It was supposed to provide trustworthy identity verification of employees with time stamps when employees arrive at the workplace or visit the clinic to avail company provided healthcare services.

As things moved forward, Mr. Jonas, a Software Engineer at the company was approached by the management to come up with a solution. After a thorough brainstorming and conducting requirement analysis, Mr. Jonas reached the conclusion that a biometric attendance system for employee time and attendance could patch the loopholes and automate the entire process.

Patient identification at clinics was still an issue. The doctors providing healthcare services for company employees wanted a better patient identification system. To meet doctors’ requirements and curb healthcare fraud, Mr. Jonas zeroed in on fingerprint patient identification for healthcare services as well.

Mr. Jonas used Touch N Go to develop a Fingerprint based attendance system along with a Fingerprint based EMS System. The systems was developed using C#, SQL and Windows Forms.

When patients arrive at the clinic, they are identified using their fingerprints. The Doctor gets an automatic alert that the patient has checked in. More than 1300 employees of Ruashi Mining are registered in the system and it has already curbed inefficiencies of manual paper based system of patient identification and employee attendance.

Since the implementation of the system, Ruashi Mining has been experiencing a dramatic improvement in payroll efficiency and reduction in cost of healthcare facilities provided by the company.

Before taking up biometric attendance system and fingerprint patient identification and, compilation and reconciliation of records took hours. Processing medical and attendance records of more than 1300 employees was a time consuming affair and company was losing money as well as precious manpower on processes that could be easily automated with technology.

Another issue was leaking company funds at employee healthcare front. There was no way to track if an employee was indeed at clinic when they took time off for it. Employees could easily escape the workplace in the name of doctor visit and could engage in personal matters.

Even at the doctor’s office it was a hassle and there would be a delay of 30 minutes to an hour to see the patients. This also meant that while employees were waiting at the doctor’s office, they are losing valuable work time. Biometrics for patient identification and employee attendance has dramatically changed it. Patients are being identified and their records are being pulled up in matter of seconds. Attendance and reporting process is also automated. When a person puts their fingerprint on the scanner – the person’s name, ID # Photo and other details are displayed.

With fingerprint patient identification, doctors are now able to verify if a visitor is an eligible employee of the company or someone else is trying to avail the service fraudulently. Choosing biometrics in healthcare has resulted in huge savings for Ruashi Mining. With authentic medical and fingerprinting records captured using fingerprint patient identification, the doctors can now serve only to company employees eligible for the healthcare scheme.