tensor_tandauk, Author at Time and Attendance Southwest

Outstanding care home sold

30th September 2020 8:56 am Leave a Comment

Ridgeway House in Bristol has been sold following the retirement of its owner. The care home was rating Outstanding at its last inspection.

The care home is family-operated, and was run by Elaine Leslie from the day of opening in 1993. The care home specialised in clients with learning difficulties, along with autism and cerebral palsy.

Elaine Leslie, managing director of Ridgeway House, said: “We have provided a home for some of the most vulnerable people in our community for over 28 years, and whilst it is never an easy decision to make, now is the time for me to step down.

“The new owner shares the same vision for the home as I have and will continue to provide the high level of care for our fantastic residents.”

Royds Withy King partner Hazel Phillips added: “We were delighted that Elaine put her trust in us to help her complete the sale of Ridgeway House.

“Elaine has been involved with this family business from the start and has built it to be the unique outstanding home that it is today. We wish her well as she moves onto new things.”

Care homes are staffed 24/7 by care workers, receptionists, security guards and other members of staff. If it is also a nursing home, with specialist nurses on-site, they will also need to have a constant presence. This means that there is likely to be a large number of overlapping and/or irregular shifts.

This is already difficult enough for supervisors to manage successfully. It is vital that there is a clear picture of who is in the building at any given time, not only for the security and reputation of the care home, but also for visitors’ safety in situations such as fire alarms.

Our specialist time and attendance system records everyone’s entrance and exit from controlled doors, using either smartcards or more expensive but more secure biometric measurements.

When the time and attendance clocking terminals from Time and Attendance South West are linked into your company’s fire alarm system, any fire alarm activation will result in the printing of a fast, automated list of who is currently clocked into the building. This is more accurate than a paper sign-in sheet.

All the door access data from our system is exportable onto all major payroll programmes. We also have the Self Service Module, which can be accessed from a browser or from your mobile via the app (available on Android and iOS). This enables employees to sign in and out and request holiday.

If the clocking in/out is done from a mobile, the information is transferred to the central Tensor.NET application, including GPS position data so that you can make sure your remote employees, such as community carers, are where they should be at that time.

Please contact us for more information on how to make your care home safe and secure.

Wapping Wharf construction nears completion

24th September 2020 9:35 am Leave a Comment

Bristol’s Wapping Wharf has reached its final stage of construction.

This latest stage of development comprises 256 new homes (163 for open market sale, 49 shared ownership and 44 for private rent). More than 90 of the open sale homes have been bought.

Currently the apartments are being internally fitted, with the next focus to be on external works such as paving and balconies.

Pauline Sangster, senior residential sales and marketing manager at Wapping Wharf Living, said: “We are seeing a whole range of buyers interested in Wapping Wharf, from young professionals and downsizers to those looking to upsize from smaller homes.

“With the government recently announcing a stamp duty holiday for properties up to £500,000, we have certainly seen a spike in interest over the last couple of months from people keen to take advantage of this window.”

Many construction contractors and clients require contractor staff to hold and display Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) smart-cards, which prove their qualifications, before allowing them on site.

Here at Time and Attendance South West, we are an IT partner of the CSCS through our parent company, Tensor plc. This means that we can provide seamless integration between the CSCS smartcard and our WinTA.NET software, which provides time management, visitor/contractor management and fire/evacuation roll-call systems.

The contactless smartcard technology enables a touch-free, COVID-secure entrance and exit policy can be implemented on site.

The integration takes the end-user form of a CSCS “card wizard”. This set of rules allows a company to quickly grant construction contractors recognition by and access to our hardware, such as clocking terminals, turnstiles, and door controllers. The wizard will run one of three scenarios when giving access rights to contractors. These are:

Contractors who are completely new to the system.
Contractors whose name exists on the system but their CSCS card has not been entered.
Contractors who are fully recorded on the system and have used their card at other sites, but are new to this particular site.

For each different scenario the wizard will guide the user through the enrolment procedure. The result is that:

The contractor’s CSCS card is read (using a USB card reader attached to a Tensor.NET Client PC)
Details are extracted from the card to update the contractor’s details within the system
Options such as a company, site, shift group and department are assigned to the cardholder

To make it easier to include new contractors in your site’s existing health and safety and security procedures, please contact us today. We can handle any size site: our Enterprise software is able to perform for global, multi-site corporations with thousands of employees/users, while our Start edition helps small businesses with less than 50 users.

New Bristol restaurant opens

18th September 2020 9:36 am Leave a Comment

A new restaurant has been announced near Cabot Circus in Bristol. It will open on Friday 2nd October.

Klosterhaus is the first venture in the South West by D&D London. It is located within the 18th century grade I-listed Quakers Friars building. It consists of a resutaurant, a bar and an open terrace, and it will serve food inspired by Central European cafes.

Klosterhaus will also feature a number of event spaces for business meetings and social events.

Des Gunewardena, chairman and chief executive of D&D London, said: “Quaker Friars is an absolute gem of a building and I hope that Klosterhaus will bring it to life.

“Bristol has a very exciting foodie scene and I hope that we can contribute to and become part of it. We are very pleased to be working again with Hammerson and are very supportive and enthusiastic about their plans for the overall development of Quakers Friars.”

Most restaurants still rely on employees to fill in handwritten timesheets stating their hours worked. Getting employees to retrospectively record their hours worked directly onto paper is not only open to fraud and mistakes, it also makes room for human error further up the chain, and it can be a massive drain on your office and payroll staff who have to approve and type up all the information.

Managers also have to collect and approve all the timesheets. A study has shown that this can take more than 15 minutes per employee. Those numbers quickly mount up!

Thankfully there’s an easy solution. A workforce management system from Time and Attendance South West would bring your attendance systems up to date and reduce workloads considerably.

Managers would no longer need to approve every single timesheet every single week or month, and accounts staff would no longer need to laboriously type up the timesheets to enter them into the payroll system.

All the staff would need to do is clock in and out using one of our terminals, with either a smartcard or a biometric measurement (fingers or hands).

If the premises cannot support a physical terminal, then we offer a web/app version called the Self Service Module. If employees use their phones to clock in, employees can mark their location using GPS. This is useful for keeping track of remote workers.

The clock-in data is collected in our WinTA.NET software, where it can be easily viewed by anyone with the right permission, and it can be exported straight to common payroll systems such as Sagepay.

Our system makes monitoring attendance and working hours quick, simple and accurate. To find out more, please get in touch today.

Cornwall hotel flourishes despite lockdown fears

27th August 2020 11:09 am Leave a Comment

The Headland, a hotel in Cornwall, has saved the vast majority of its job roles.

Initially, the double five-star hotel was planning to make 80 staff redundant to financially cope with losses from the pandemic lockdown.

However, after the hospitality industry reopened in England on the 4th of July, the number of necessary redundancies was reduced to just 8.

This outcome was the result of a combination of many factors, including the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, the rise of UK staycations and the opening of the hotel’s new swimming and wellbeing centre, The Aqua Club.

Such is the increase in demand that there are 20 new vacancies, from general manager to seasonal bar staff.

Owner Carolyn Armstrong said, “Having worked closely with our team for over 40 years, it was incredibly upsetting to have to start the difficult process of asking for voluntary redundancies back in June.

While we are sorry to have to lose eight members of our team, we are relieved that 72 of the 80 at risk roles have been saved.”

She added, “We would like to thank our team for the patience, understanding and generosity shown during the lockdown, many of whom initially offered to job share in order to protect the livelihoods of their peers, whilst future proofing the business.”

Thanks to a profusion of temporary, agency and zero-hour staff in the hotel industry, many payroll departments are still struggling with paper timesheets and sign-in books, self-reported by staff.

These have many disadvantages, including employees losing or forgetting the pieces of paper. Fraud and mistaken information is also likely to occur with this format. Stories abound online about employees filling in timesheets for shifts they never attended, not to mention the lesser evil of falsifying timesheets to hide lateness.

Paper timesheets are also hugely inefficient for payroll staff – they need to be collected, filed, and then their information transferred manually into the payroll system.

Purchasing a workplace management system from Time and Attendance South West will solve these issues. If employees have to clock in at the clocking terminal before entering and leaving, there will no longer be any ambiguity about working hours and no need to sort through hundreds of timesheets at the end of the week or month.

Supervisors and managers can also check all of the timing data for their assigned team members easily within the software, which gets rid of squinting at bad handwriting, and also gets rid of the need to chase people up for handing them in late.

Please get in touch for more information.

COVID19 policy: We provide online product demos, as well as online training once products are purchased, and our engineers follow a strict social distancing policy.

Engineering company buys new premises

6th August 2020 9:13 am Leave a Comment

Venture Engineering, an engineering and fabrication company based in the Cotswolds, will expand into new premises.

Customers of the five year-old company include Rofgo, Aston Martin, Ford, Haas F1 Team, Redbull F1, Williams F1, Prodrive, Noble Automotive and Duncan Hamilton Rofgo.

The company will move into Unit 7 at Downs Road, Tungsten Park, Witney. This business park is 24-acres in size and located 500 metres from the new A40 junction.

Their new 15,000 sq ft unit will become the new premises for Venture’s motorsport engineering and fabrication company which is currently based in Bourton-on-the-Water near Cheltenham. This is expected to happen after March 2021, when construction of the unit is completed.

Adrian Perkins, director of Venture Engineering, said: “The move from Bourton-on-the-Water to Witney will aid the expansion of our business. Moving into Motorsport Valley and being near to the M40 are key to our plans.

“Tungsten Park was chosen as the area was perfect but also the build quality and relationship built with Tungsten over the past six months made our decision very easy. While motorsport is our background, we are gradually moving into other sectors including transport, battery power, architectural, automotive to name but a few, so this move to Witney will help us quickly achieve our growth goals.”

David Mole, associate development director at Tungsten Properties, said: “A warm welcome to Venture Engineering to Tungsten Park Witney. They will be joining a business community that is being built to cater for those companies which are experiencing business growth and looking for new, state of the art warehouse space.

“To have secured three businesses at our new project shows the strength of Witney as a business location in Oxfordshire.”

Factories and production facilities have been using clocking in and out to monitor and measure their employees’ hours for payroll pretty much since the start of factories. The first time-recording machine was invented in 1888!

However, there is still plenty of room for factories to modernise their time and attendance systems!

Some companies are still using very old-fashioned methods such as swipe cards or punch cards. Depending on your requirements, we can offer three alternatives.

Firstly, if they would like to keep using cards to record their time and attendance in order to disrupt the workforce as little as possible, then we can offer you our contactless proximity smartcards.

These are about the size of an average credit card, and fit in your wallet. The radio frequency technology means that you don’t even have to take them out of the wallet in order to scan them!

This completely contactless technique means that the card doesn’t suffer from wear and tear and doesn’t need a battery, and so barring an absolute disaster can go on indefinitely.

The second option is fingerprint scanning. This is useful for factories which have had problems with people losing their cards, or who need to prevent people deliberately swapping cards and clocking in for each other.

Whenever registered users have their fingerprints scanned, a comparison is made between the live fingerprint and the stored fingerprint template and if the two match, the event is saved in the central controller database.

South West COVID cases rise alarmingly

31st July 2020 12:03 pm Leave a Comment

The ‘R’ rate of COVID19 infections is currently at a median of 1.04 for the south west, which is the highest in England.

This is the ‘reproduction rate’ of the virus, or how many people will become infected through contact with one infected person. Measles has a natural R rate of 15, for example, and it is thought that if no precaautions were taken the COVID19 virus would have an R rate of about 3.

An R rate of one or below is what the UK government aimed for during the initial lockdown period.

The study from the MRC Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge University showed that the data from different areas of the south-west range from 0.77 to 1.38, giving a median score of 1.04.

This demonstrates the regional variation across England, with the R rate rising in the south west and the south east, and new restrictions announced earlier in the north-west, but the east of England and Midlands regions are lower. The data suggests a mid-August death peak of 43 – 84 per day, which is not a return to the peaks in April.

Speaking to Sky News this morning, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock did not address this new data:

He said: “These figures are published by the statisticians and there will be another publication tomorrow and I’m not going to pre-judge again what the statisticians say because it is important to do this properly.

“But we have seen that the number of cases which was coming down pretty sharply that has flattened off, the number of people who have positive cases and we follow these things very closely.”

Not all workplaces have the luxury of being able to work from home, and many businesses are following the recent UK government advice to bring their furloughed employees back into the workplace if it is safe to do so.

We have been working hard to update our products and ranges in ways which are helpful during the pandemic, from our automated fire roll call app to changing how you manage your shift patterns.

Our latest offering is an automated symptom-screening solution, in partnership with our long-time partner Suprema – a leading global provider of security and biometrics solutions with a Global Sales Network of over 140 countries and more than 1.5 million systems installed worldwide.

We feel that temperature detection is vital as a COVID-prevention strategy because a high temperature is less noticeable than other symptoms, such as a cough, and so may be overlooked by supervisors, or even by the employees themselves. There is also the danger of presenteeism, which is experiencing a resurgence due to the increase in lay-offs before the end of the furlough scheme

The Suprema FaceStation 2 Facial Recognition Terminal with Temperature Detection offers enhanced functionality when running with Tensor.NET:

conducts rapid, contactless preliminary temperature screenings. This enables businesses to feel confident in a first-line filter for elevated body temperature. The terminal can be used in office buildings, warehouses, factories, schools, stations, airports and other public areas.
generates alerts when detecting elevated body temperatures. This alert can be sent to the health and safety officers within your organisation, and can also be integrated with our access control system to automatically forbid entry to the premises.
provides enhanced security with 1 or 2-factor authentication options. You can choose to authenticate employees and visitors using facial recognition alone or facial recognition alongside contactless radio-frequency smart card. EM/HID Prox, MiFare and DESFire card formats are supported.

If you’d like to find out more about the numerous features and extensive level of functionality that we can deliver, please contact us !

COVID19 POLICY: We provide online product demos, as well as online training once products are purchased, so that no unnecessary physical contact will take place. Our engineers are following a strict social distancing policy during the COVID19 pandemic.

E-Commerce Company Makes Move

23rd July 2020 10:40 am Leave a Comment

International e-commerce specialist Superb Media has moved to Torbay’s EPIC Centre.

The company has more than 120 staff, with offices in Barcelona, London, Nottingham and Ukraine. Their clients have included Tripp Luggage, Usborne Publishing, Defected Records, Missy Empire and Portmeirion Group.

The move has created three new jobs, and they plan to expand further into the centre this year.

Matthew Blay, co-founder and managing director of Superb, said: “The company and I had aspirations of finding a suitable location in the South West to grow the business. We are passionate about our work, and when we saw the offices at EPIC we immediately had a vision of how we would set up and how we could provide opportunities to local experts.”

Wayne Loschi, EPIC Centre director, said: “Superb is a great addition to EPIC. Matt and his team have a top-floor office with stunning sea views and have invested heavily in branding the space. They have exciting growth plans and are working with high-profile multinational customers. We look forward to working with Superb to raise the profile of EPIC, its businesses and the wider hi-tech sector.”

Moving to new offices is the perfect time to assess your time and attendance system.

Many office-based companies don’t believe that they need a structured attendance monitoring system, but we argue that the data from our attendance system can gather will boost efficiency. As we say at Time and Attendance South West, a time and attendance system isn’t Big Brother, it just gives you the big picture!

You may not need to know the exact timings of your salaried staff as a boss or a manager, but HR might find a full history of their timings very important if you ask them to put a member of staff on a disciplinary for lateness.

Without careful documentation, proving lateness could be difficult.

Many companies still operate on a casual “Just let me know,” attitude, which make it difficult to clearly state how many absences they might have had over a certain time period without laboriously scrolling through texts or emails.

With our centralised time and attendance system, HR can see everyone’s clocking data for whom they have permission, and quickly and easily export this or format it into reports using our report wizard or advanced report creation settings.

Staff can clock in either using our physical terminals, which work with fingerprints and/or radio-frequency smartcards, or if physical terminals cannot be installed then we can offer an online/app-based clocking in service called the Self-Service Module (SSM).

The mobile app version can also utilise GPS to tell you the location of employees as they clock in, which is useful for remote workers.

For more information, please get in touch today.

SIG Roofing to bring new jobs to Bristol

7th July 2020 11:47 am Leave a Comment

SIG Roofing, the UK’s largest specialist distributor of roofing related products, is investing £4m into a new distribution hub in More+ Central Park.

The 31,617 sq ft warehouse unit, signed on a ten year lease, will be the region’s new distribution centre. It is intended to secure jobs in the area, and to attract investment. SIG is expected to move into its new base in the summer of 2020.

Jonathan Robinson, Barberry development director, said: “More+ Central Park has been a fantastic success story and has proved attractive to many major companies.

“It is the ideal location for SIG Roofing’s new regional distribution centre, prominently located next to the M49 near junction one, and will provide a welcome investment and employment boost for the area.”

Divisional managing director for the South George King added: “The launch of a brand new hub in Bristol is an exciting step for SIG Roofing that will help make us, as a business, more efficient and stronger.

“This major investment programme signifies our commitment to providing a first-rate service to our customers, whilst also future proofing our business to further cement our number one position in the market.”

Amazon may be using robots in its warehouses worldwide nowadays, but most warehouses and other storage facilities still rely on manual labour to fulfil tasks. These positions are likely to be filled by temporary workers, obtained via an agency, particularly around holiday seasons.

Many temp agencies still pay their employees using timesheets to record the working hours. The temp worker fills them in weekly with their hours and sends them to the agency. Sometimes these are digital timesheets, using Microsoft Office or PDF, and sometimes they go all the way back in technology to pen and paper.

This kind of payroll process is fraught with possibilities for errors and outright fraud. Not only is it possible for the worker to submit an incorrect timesheet, as often agency timesheets aren’t signed off by the worker’s supervisor, but the process of typing out all these handwritten timesheets into an Excel document or whatever the company payment software requires is very likely to yield typos which change the end payment.

In order to stay on the right side of the National Minimum Wage regulations and the European Working Time Directive, sensible and forward-thinking companies should invest in technology to remove these weaknesses.

Our time and attendance system collects clocking data via radio-frequency smart-cards or fingerprint biometrics. Once workers clock in, the data is sent straight to the centralised software. From there, it can be easily exported or used to create reports with our helpful report wizard.

Please get in touch for more information!

COVID19: We can provide online product demos, as well as online training once products are purchased, and our engineers follow a strict social distancing policy.

SYNETIQ updates its premises

26th June 2020 5:04 pm Leave a Comment

SYNETIQ, the largest salvage and dismantling company in the UK, aims to expand its Gloucester site as part of a multi-million-pound development project.

The project has already commenced. It includes new concrete works, large-scale racking systems, more purpose-built de-pollution facilities, and remodelled premium breaking and parts storage facilities.

This will mean that an entirely new SYNETIQ site is needed. Employees and processes will transfer to the new site ,with the old site in Cinderford shutting by the end of September.

Jason Cross, client director of SYNETIQ said: “The investment in the expansion of our Gloucester site is exciting, driven by our aspiration to lead the industry whilst delivering an exceptional, compliant and innovative service to our clients.

“This move is testament to our confidence in our business and our people, who will have the chance to develop and grow within our ambitious and scalable organisation.”

Factories and production facilities have been using clocking in and out to monitor and measure their employees’ hours for payroll since the rise of mass production. The first time-recording machine was invented in 1888!

However, there is still plenty of room for factories to modernise their time and attendance systems!

Some companies are still using very old-fashioned methods such as swipe cards or punch cards. Depending on the company’s requirements, we can offer some alternatives.

Firstly, if they would like to keep using cards to record their time and attendance in order to disrupt the workforce as little as possible, then we can offer the company our contactless proximity smartcards.

These are about the size of an average credit card, and fit in your wallet. The radio frequency technology means that you don’t even have to take them out of the wallet in order to scan them!

This completely contactless technique means that the card doesn’t suffer from wear and tear and doesn’t need a battery, and so barring an absolute disaster can go on indefinitely.

The second option is fingerprint scanning. This is useful for factories which have had problems with people losing their cards, or with people deliberately swapping cards and clocking in for each other.

Please get in touch for more information!

Brand new consultancy company sets up in Plymouth Science Park

2nd June 2020 3:25 pm Leave a Comment

Ultra Semi, a brand new consultancy service to the semiconductor industries, will occupy space at Plymouth Science Park alongside 90 other tech and science businesses.

Although the company was only launched in May, managing director Clive Beech has more than 40 years’ experience in the semiconductor industry. Most recently he was the “Senior Director, Business Development,” for Plessy Semiconductors. The company intends to offer its expertise in process and device architecture, yield improvement, reliability assessment, test, failure analysis and project management.

“Plymouth Science Park is an ideal location for Ultra Semi to be based,” said Beech. “We are very appreciative of the support that the team there has provided and we look forward to growing our business and firmly establishing ourselves in this prestigious science and technology community.”

Fay Davies, business development manager at Plymouth Science Park, added: “Plymouth Science Park offers an ideal space for Ultra Semi to establish a base, evolve and collaborate. These are exciting times for them, and us.”

Many microbusinesses don’t see the point in using a time and attendance system, but we think differently.

We know from experience that companies find the data we can offer them very useful in building up a bigger picture of attendance and productivity.

If you rent your premises, as many smaller businesses which have expanded out of the owner’s house do, and cannot install any extra wiring, your employees can use our web-based attendance recording rather than our physical terminals.

This is called the Self Service Module (SSM), and it allows employees to clock in and out using either a browser version, or a mobile phone app. They can also request holiday using this app, which eliminates the need for cumbersome paper holiday forms.

Please get in touch for more information. Our software is suitable for any size of business, from microbusiness to multi-national.

Author Archives: tensor_tandauk