Companies all over the world still use biometric time attendance systems. The Biometric Time Attendance System (BTAS) is still perceived as the most sophisticated and effective real-time employee data gathering system. Fingerprints or IDs are used in the traditional attendance system.
Because they are simple to use, many organizations still rely on outdated technologies like fingerprints, proximity cards, and manual spreadsheets. But actually, time and attendance tracking solutions are being used by an increasing number of businesses. However, a growing number of companies are actually using time and attendance tracking solutions.
What motivated them to do so? Does your company require changes? Is the shift worthwhile?
The biometric attendance system has a number of drawbacks, including the fact that it is:
Being human, we all have the potential to make mistakes, Sometimes, employees don’t clock in at the right time. Sometimes you don’t fill out the attendance papers with the right numbers.
The admin labor can get more monotonous, time-consuming, and unpleasant as your firm expands, hires more people, and adds more locations to his duties.
To manage their workforce, many firms relied on touch-based biometric attendance systems like fingerprint recognition, hand geometry recognition, or typing recognition that require physical touch.
But, when COVID-19 struck, the same fast and non-invasive attendance systems became hotspots for spreading the infection. With every touch, the surfaces of these systems pick up and spread bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms. That’s why many companies and government agencies began to suspend the extensively used touch-based biometric attendance system.
Since then, ensuring that critical services continue to operate while keeping everyone safe has been the biggest challenge in most places.
And yet, the disadvantages of the traditional attendance system are not limited to just the fear of touch that affects employees’ mental and emotional states. There are still many disadvantages that include, but are not limited to:
There is a lack of flexibility to identify the person in case of a wound or when fingerprints are smudged with dirt or grease. Fingerprint sensors are sensitive, which works in their favor if the fingers are clean, but these sensors are inefficient for industries like mining, construction, and manufacturing. The workforce in these industries either wears safety gear like gloves or has dirt and dust on their fingers. It makes it cumbersome for them to record their attendance.
Relying on hardware sensors that require physical contact makes them less sensitive in case fingers are smudged in oil or grease, or if workers are wearing hand gear.
Fingerprint attendance systems are entirely dependent on hardware and peripherals. It is often expensive to scale these systems, as you will need to install hardware at every location. There is no alternative to investing in new hardware every time. Over time, the drawbacks of biometric scanning become obvious for businesses with a primarily distributed workforce, where employees work at remote locations or on expansive production floors.
Fingerprint attendance systems often store data about physical traits such as fingerprints and palm veins in a local database. This information is linked to individual workers, and at times, it is essential to keep the data protected. Companies enabling fingerprint attendance systems have to deploy measures to prevent the data from being hacked or stolen
Dependence on standalone machines is one of the significant disadvantages of fingerprint identification. Such attendance systems require dedicated hardware to record attendance. Companies cannot deploy standalone kiosks or computers at fields or remote locations.
In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has made a significant impact on the development of innovative systems, such as Smart Attendance System, to address the weaknesses of traditional systems by developing automated systems using this latest technology.
Therefore, this aims to develop an effective attendance-taking process integrated with BLE technology using IoT applications to assist the companies to monitor and track the attendance of the employees via web-based and mobile applications.
Various technologies have been developed and emerged recently, to provide an automatic approach to attendance monitoring and management systems.
Many well-known technologies have been used for this purpose, such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), Near-Field Communication (NFC), Bluetooth, barcode readers, magnetic stripes and biometric techniques including face recognition, signatures, fingerprints, voice recognition and iris recognition. With these technologies, the process of recording attendance data becomes easier, faster, and more accurate.
However, there are some drawbacks to using QR codes, barcodes, RFID, NFC, and magnetic stripe charges for hardware-based solutions, such as a long registration time, error-proneness, low accuracy, short range, battery life requirements, data sources that use artificial identification, as well as problems that are similar to traditional manual management and individual staff statistics for attendance management records.
It is time to leave behind the notebooks and the attendance control in excel. Now, you can digitize the attendance record using aan automated solution that streamlines the HR department’s operations in place of those antiquated and ineffective procedures.
The smart attendance control solution allows you to easily manage hours worked, arrivals and departures, vacation requests, and absences of your staff in real time.
You can track the hours and attendance of your employees more easily by using a solution like GeoInTime™, which streamlines the entire process.
