UK manufacturers in industries ranging from food to furniture, engineering to electronics, and cars to chemicals directly employ 2.7 million workers. But whilst some have advantages in terms of size or access to specialist skills, investment levels or state-of-the-art machinery, the real competition lies in getting the most out of their employees’ time. Time lost to buddy clocking, absenteeism or presenteeism, shoddy shift planning, or to a workplace culture where time is seen as cheap, hurts the productivity and competitiveness of UK manufacturing more than anything else.
Whether you have a modest site housing 50 employees or a sprawling plant seeing 5,000 workers work ‘3-shift’ systems 24 hrs a day, every time a worker clocks in for someone else or takes extended breaks, your time – and money – is squandered, honest workers have to pick up the slack, targets slip and customers look elsewhere. Standalone or fitted with turnstiles, our facial recognition or fingerscan terminals stop buddy clocking, provide real-time, fool-proof attendance records, and keep your business competitive.
Multiple biometric fingerscan terminals situated along the production line track individual or group work with the data helping line managers and HR analyse attendance as well as productivity levels. If your workers wear gloves, proximity terminals activated by fobs or badges can also be used. These systems can further be associated with heavy machinery to stop untrained workers operating machines that they are not adequately trained to use.
By establishing a hierarchy of access permission privileges, biometric scanners can restrict access to high security areas containing high value items, equipment, or hazardous or toxic chemicals.
If you’ve got sales teams, delivery drivers or repair crews regularly on the road you can use mobile clocking with GPS location tracking.
These systems require little technical knowledge and training. In the case of biometrics, all that is required is an initial capture of an individual’s unique fingerprint, palm shape, or facial features.
Accessed on a PC or laptop at any manufacturing site or at head office, our Live Personnel Attendance Dashboard displays clocking data from every terminal or scanner in real-time.
Our software makes it easy to pay everyone – including full-time workers, contractors or agency workers – fairly and on time, which in turn boosts morale. The software also automatically deducts lunch breaks, late arrivals, early departures, holidays, sickness, even partial absences. All the data can then be imported into payroll software like Sage in minutes.
Our scheduling software enables you to carefully plan rosters and work schedules to help with the wellbeing needs of employees working outside normal hours, react instantly to unscheduled absences, and with automatic alerts notifying supervisors, managers or HR when an employee is approaching their work hour limit, ensure your manufacturing business is compliant.
Unscheduled absence often has profound implications in terms of lost productivity. Our built-in Bradford Factor calculator helps HR monitor absence patterns and task line managers or supervisors with uncovering the root causes of persistent absence issues such as personal problems, poor management, or environment or cultural factors.
With Jobstandard, you can track the time it takes workers to complete specific jobs. This helps identify worker/role mismatches, target training, and reward high performers. It is also a great tool to use to spot workers who might be too sick to work, understand the financial impact of presenteeism, and deal with the underlying causes so that everyone who comes in to work is fit to work safely and productively.
Security staff can run fire roll call reports on a PC or mobile phone (many of our manufacturing clients leave dedicated phones in key locations too). Roll calls can be site wide or display attendance at specific areas to escalate evacuations and inform emergency crews.
To help your manufacturing site improve health and safety procedures, minimise risks and decrease the probability of unforeseen incidents, our software lets you record and analyse all incidents and put in place training and preventative measures to reduce repeat incidents. Our accident record templates also meet the standards set out in the Health and Safety at Work Act.
Our time and attendance and payroll data can be safely stored for 7 years so that any future claims made by former employees, agency workers or contractors can be resolved swiftly and fairly.
With Timestandard, you can run reports on individual sites or contrast the performance of multiple sites against overtime, absence, and productivity targets and use this information to inform vital strategic decisions.