Author Archives: tensor_tandauk

1. New premises should mean a new view on time and attendance

   19th September 2018 3:33 pm Leave a Comment

   The University of Bath and South Gloucestershire Council have bought the Bristol and Bath Science Park with a joint £18 million bid.

   The new owners will use their complementary strengths, expertise and networks to fully realise the park’s potential as a centre of excellence for research and development across the region, potentially creating huge numbers of high value jobs. 

    

   The science park is in a prime location and provides an ideal base for national businesses, the University of Bath said.

    

   Plans for the 36-acre site will complement existing businesses based at the Park as well as exploiting regional science and engineering strengths. These include:

   • maximising the potential of the National Composites Centre (NCC)

   • creating GO2, a new Grow-on Centre, to build on the success of the existing complex

   • utilising the Forum exhibition and conference facility to support additional SMEs.

    

   Professor Egan said: “Purchasing the science park is an important step in the realisation of our university strategy. It will enable us to increase our research activity to address global problems.

    

   "It will contribute to business and technology development across our region as well as providing additional capacity and facilities to complement those on our Claverton campus, in London and in Bath city centre.”

    

   Leader of South Gloucestershire Council, Toby Savage, said: “The Science Park in Emersons Green is a world-class centre for science and technology businesses to grow and prosper and is already home to a wide variety of innovative and inspirational start-ups.

    

   “The council, along with our partners at the University of Bath recognise the park’s potential as a future driver of economic growth which would bring even more new high tech jobs to the area. 

    

   The sale was facilitated by Homes England and advised by Bristol-based property consultancy JLL.

    

   Paul Baker, director at JLL in Bristol, said: “We believe that this joint purchase will breathe new life into the park and the IAAPS project will act as the stimulus for other development on the site.

    

   "This new centre of excellence in automotive engineering will also attract businesses in this sector to the region, potentially enabling the emergence of a new specialist tech cluster in the Bristol and Bath area.”

    

    

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   If this joint project works as intended, the business park will not only improve its reputation to become a leader in its region, but it will also start to attract highly-qualified applicants from other areas too. 

    

   This is particularly the case with SMEs, which the council and university have said they are interested in helping using their conference centres and Exhibition hall.

    

   An influx of new staff is the perfect opportunity to check whether or not your time and attendance system is as efficient as it should be. 

    

   Many companies are still using paper timesheets to record their employees’ hours and calculate their weekly or monthly payslips. There are many disadvantages to this type of attendance management which you should be aware of if you are still using these in 2018. 

    

   For example, if your timesheets are submitted monthly it is unlikely that employees will be able to remember their exact hours for the whole month. 

   This would then lead to incorrect payslips, which could cause problems with the employees, or even with outside authorities if you don’t realise that unreported overtime has put your employee over the Working Time Regulations. 

    

   Our time and attendance system records everyone’s entrance and exit from controlled doors, using either smartcards or the more expensive but more secure biometric measurements of hands or fingerprints. So there’s no more chance for employees to forget timings, or to deliberately lie.

    

   All the entrance/exit data from our system is exportable into a format suitable for all major payroll programmes. This means that payroll staff don’t have to struggle with employees’ bad handwriting, which further reduces the likelihood of human error. 

    

   The software automatically calculates whether employees’ shifts and hours would make them breach the Working Time Regulations. One less thing to worry about. 

    

   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 amongst other features. 

2. Paper timesheets are out of date and at risk of enabling fraud

   11th September 2018 2:28 pm Leave a Comment

   Everest Media, a Cornish media company, has moved to larger premises after more than doubling its turnover in less than two years.

   Their new office is in the Pool Innovation Centre in Redruth. Since 2016, revenues have increased by 128% with 40% from international partnerships. Turnover at the last year-end was £768,000.

   Headcount at the agency has also increased, going from 8 – 18 digital experts and developers and still recruiting. 

   Samuele Armondi, managing director at Everest Media, said: "We’ve moved into a great space at the Innovation Centre, that will give us the freedom to continue to grow and develop as a business.

   "We are an ambitious Cornish company and aim to continue to bring in the talented individuals we need to help us make a difference to new and existing clients. With one of the fastest growing digital and technology sectors in the UK, we are confident that Cornwall is the right place to enable our business to really thrive."

    

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   Moving into new premises is the prime time to take stock of your time and attendance management systems and make changes if necessary. 

   Changes are likely to be needed if you are hiring more staff for the new premises, since this will put stress on existing tasks like on-boarding procedures, payroll processing and keeping up to date with timesheets.

    

   Our WinTA.NET workplace management system can smooth out any problems that you may be having. The largest source of improvements that we see are from companies which still use some kind of paper recording system. 

    

   This might be a paper sign-in sheet for daily hours or fire roll call, or it might be weekly or monthly timesheets meant to be passed to accounts for payroll processing.

    

   Getting employees to record their hours worked directly onto paper is not only open to fraud and mistakes from them, it also makes room for human error further up the chain. What if managers lose/drop timesheets as they collect them up? What if the person transcribing the timesheets ready for payroll can’t read a worker’s handwriting?

    

   Thankfully there’s an easy solution. When employees clock in using our clocking terminals (these accept smartcard or biometric data) the information is recorded by the software and can be exported straight to your payroll software. 

    

   Remember: minimal human involvement means minimum human error!

3. Factories need to update their time and attendance systems

   4th September 2018 2:29 pm Leave a Comment

   BMW have submitted plans for new 138,639 sq ft manufacturing facility complete with offices on the site of an existing plant in Swindon.

    

   If the plans are approved, the land would boast a new production facility for the car maker. There are currently 850 staff on the site, producing doors, bonnets, tailgates and roof assemblies for Mini vehicles.

    

   The proposed facility would be built on a recently demolished building at the southern end of the site.

    

   The application’s design and access statement said: "The proposed development comprises the erection of a new manufacturing building with an ancillary excess material building and container office. These buildings comprise 12,880 sq m (138,639 sq ft) of floorspace.

    

   "The proposed development would also include car parking, landscaped areas and the reconfiguration of circulation roads.

    

   "The rationale for the planning application is that BMW would like to secure a planning permission for a new manufacturing building to enhance and support the case for investment at BMW Plant Swindon.

    

   "Should consent be granted, the decision to invest in BMW Plant Swindon will be made once planning consent has been achieved; therefore, without a planning consent there would be no chance of investment.

    

   "BMW request a five-year time period for the implementation of the planning consent, as opposed to the standard three-year time period, to provide flexibility on the potential for investment."

    

   The site has been home to car panel production facilities since 1955 and was originally owned by Pressed Steel Fisher until 1968 when was acquired by British Leyland. In 1986, Rover Group and British Aerospace took the helm until 1994 when the plant was bought by the BMW Group, who have since invested £40m in the site.

    

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   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 the company’s 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 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. 

    

   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 Time and Attendance controller database.

    

   These first two options can both be programmed onto the same reader; our time and attendance clocking station. The next option is a different piece of hardware, though it is seamlessly incorporated into our software.

    

   And last but certainly not least, companies could opt for the hand geometry scanner. This is equally as useful as the fingerprint scanner option, but is better in situations where workers might end up with very dirty fingers, like a construction site or a kitchen. 

    

   The terminal captures an image of the hand each time the employee punches. The hand’s size and the shape are used to verify their identity accurately. No finger or palm prints are recorded. 

4. Factory expansion needs suitable time and attendance system

   28th August 2018 4:03 pm Leave a Comment

   Orbital Fabrications, a Cornish fabrications company, celebrated its 30th year in business by expanding its premises. 

    

   The company offers specialised orbital welding and high-tech fabrication to a variety of clients within the pharmaceutical, aerospace, chemical, semiconductor and allied industries, worldwide.

    

   Orbital, which currently employs 55 staff, has invested £120,000 in expanding its facility by adding an additional 3,500 sq ft.

    

   The company has also recently invested £95,000 in a computer controlled precision welding system permits wire feed and lathe welding.

    

   Ian Pearson, chairman, said: "As a business we take great pride in developing new designs and delivering innovative engineering solutions, utilising the latest technology and implementing state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques that will ensure our respected position within the industry.

    

   "We are excited about the future and the forecast of growth for Orbital and we welcome the opportunity to create more jobs in the South West."

    

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   When there is an expansion of both working space and employee numbers, as is the case for Orbital Fabrications, it is important that business make sure their time and attendance systems can deal with the challenge.

    

   This challenge could take several forms. Firstly, if your company still uses paper timesheets your existing payroll staff could find their workloads overstretched by the new staff members, as processing paper timesheets is a very labour-intensive and inefficient task. 

    

   Secondarily, if you use a clocking in and out system which does not record exactly who has just clocked in or out irrefutably, you are leaving yourself open to time fraud in the form of “buddy punching”, where employees swap cards, PINs or passwords to log in as each other. 

    

   The best method of attendance management is biometric clocking in and out. It is much more difficult to fool biometric stations, requiring advanced knowledge and technology as opposed to just swapping information. 

    

   At Time and Attendance South East we sell fingerprint scanners and hand scanners for biometric time and attendance management. 

5. Automated fire roll call

   20th August 2018 2:48 pm Leave a Comment

   Electrical services company Drewlec has installed a specialist fire alarm system at a plating factory.

   The system was installed at the Twickenham Plating Group premises in Poole over two weeks.

   Richard Drewitt, managing director of The Drewitt Group, said: "The longstanding partnership with Twickenham Plating Group has been fantastic for us all at The Drewitt Group, we’ve worked closely alongside them in order to provide ongoing advice and guidance as to the systems that they require.”

    

   Penny Bridge, health and safety manager of Twickenham Plating Group Ltd., said: "We have many years of excellent customer service provided by Richard and his team.

    

   "They have provided excellent guidance and support on the requirements to meet our fire safety responsibilities."

    

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   Here at Time and Attendance South West, we can offer an integrated fire roll call feature. 

    

   When our time and attendance clocking terminals are linked into your company’s fire alarm system, any fire alarm activation will result in the printing of a fast, automated fire evacuation list. This is more accurate than a paper sign-in sheet, since the list is pulled from the system records of who has clocked in that day.

    

   From the most basic “on site” reporting, to the individual tracking of employee’s movement between fire zone/fire assembly points, Time and Attendance South West’s integrated Fire Roll Call feature can be tailored to meet your safety requirements.

    

   To make your health and safety inspector’s day with a safe, fast and accurate fire roll call, contact us to find out more.

6. Staffing expansion can cause administration issues

   14th August 2018 10:32 am Leave a Comment

   After a 1m project for a South Korean company, a Devon-based thermal engineering company are anticipating staffing expansion. 

   The company, GRE, has been developing systems for the South Korean smart energy market, and they have forward orders valued at 2m. 

   Currently they employ 22 people, and after their success they are hoping to increase this.

   Managing director Richard Booth said: "The ultra-pure water cooling system is a fantastic example of high quality British engineering, designed and built here in Devon. The bespoke cooling solution is a first and enables our South Korean client to operate the SVC power transmission system with guaranteed reliability.

   "The shipping of the system is just the start of our work with one of South Korea’s leading smart power providers. We’re also pleased to announce that we are already working on a further commission, which is currently in manufacture, and additional projects are also under discussion.

   "Our desire, drive and ability to solve complex problems means that we’re in constant demand. This has fuelled our growth, enabling us to expand our team with three new engineers and a new director in the last year alone. With several exciting, new projects on the horizon, we fully expect to add further to our workforce over the coming months."

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   Additional workforce is a sign of success and growth for all businesses, but it can cause problems for HR, accounts and admin job tasks if not managed properly. For example, if your company still uses paper timesheets filled in weekly or monthly to work out attendance and wages, a sudden influx of more staff can add hours to a workload. 

   A workforce management system from Time and Attendance South West would bring your attendance systems up to date and reduce workloads considerably.

   For example, 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). This data is collected in our WinTA.NET software, and it can be exported straight to common payroll systems such as Sagepay. 

   Another useful function of our time and attendance system is an automated fire roll call. Currently you might be reading names with difficulty from a handwritten sign in sheet, which can be misplaced. In the future, our system can be hooked up to your fire alarm and when it goes off it will automatically print a list of everyone who is currently clocked into the building.

    

7. Digital learning company opened new office in Temple Gate, Bristol

   8th August 2018 1:17 pm Leave a Comment

   Sponge, a digital learning and technology company with a Plymouth HQ, has opened a new office in Bristol. 

    

   The office at CityPoint in Temple Gate is the fifth location for Plymouth-headquartered Sponge, and its second in the South West.

    

   As part of its ongoing expansion, Sponge is planning to increase employee numbers to 300 within the next five years and to open more offices in Europe and in the US.

   Sponge’s clients include Coca-Cola, BMW, adidas, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Royal Mail, AstraZeneca, Specsavers, and AXA.

    

   Over the last three years the company has grown significantly, from a turnover of £1.9m in 2014 to £5.2m in 2017. Last year, the company’s turnover grew by 50 per cent, allowing the creation of 40 additional jobs, and 2018’s turnover is on track for £7.5m.

    

   Louise Pasterfield, founder and managing director at Sponge, said: "When we were looking for a new location to expand into, we were immediately drawn to what Bristol has to offer.  It has been named as a globally significant tech cluster and it is home to a number of world-class creative companies.

    

   "Bristol aligns completely with how we work at Sponge. We use creativity and innovation to help people learn and grow and to help businesses succeed. We are very much looking forward to growing our presence here in the years to come."

    

   A major increase in staff numbers, such as Sponge will encounter if its expansion plans go smoothly, can cause problems for staff performing HR, admin and accounts job roles, particularly in the area of time management.

    

   For example, it is very easy for staff to fill in paper timesheets incorrectly. Sometimes this can be deliberate time fraud, but sometimes it is just people forgetting to fill in their timesheets until a week later. Delays like this can lead to misremembering exact shift details, as well as delaying the whole timesheet processing task unnecessarily.

    

   Even if the details are all delivered on time and correctly, paper timesheets are generally manually transferred to an Excel spreadsheet before being sent to payroll software. 

    

   There are many opportunities for human error to kick in during this time-consuming process – e.g. making an unrecognised typo in entering, or misreading employee’s handwriting (1 or 7? O or 0 or D?). This can result in incorrect payslips. 

    

   Incorrect data can also cause problems for HR tasks too, making it much more difficult to spot issues like adherence to the Working Time Directive or someone taking three 30 minute breaks plus lunch.

    

   At Time and Attendance South West we offer specialised time and attendance management software which can work either with smartcards or with biometrics (fingerprints or hand scanners). 

    

   Your staff clock-in using a terminal, and the information is logged. At the end of the week or month, or whenever you need, the data on how many hours people were clocked in for can be exported straight to your payroll system. (Our products are compatible with all the major providers, please feel free to ask if you’re uncertain).

8. JBP, Bristol communications company, is relocating

   2nd August 2018 10:24 am Leave a Comment

    JBP, a communications company in Bristol, will be moving into new offices in the city centre.

   The company has been based at Clifton for 23 years, but as part of its growth plans it will now be moving to Castlemead, the tallest building in the city. 

    

   The CEO since last year, Steve Anderson-Dixon, said: "A more central location puts us at the heart of the business community which has gravitated in recent years to the area close to the main train station. It also enables us to connect faster with our growing London operation in Westminster, enhancing the integration of our PR and political activities.

    

   "The office move will also mark the beginning of our new positioning as a communications consultancy that supports organisations in the disruptive world in which we operate and live. We are also launching another side to our business where we will bring our expertise, connections and market knowledge to develop our business strategy."

    

   Chris Lawrance, managing director of JBP’s Bristol operation, said: "It’s sad to be leaving our office in Clifton where we’ve been for over two decades. But as a business-to-business communications consultancy it is critical that we are working within the main business centre in the city which our new office offers.

    

   "It comes at an exciting time for the business with a number of new national and international clients having been secured recently. We’re really looking forward to our new home and welcoming existing and new clients as well as new recruits."

    

   Moving offices is the perfect time to take stock of how you measure attendance. Is it an efficient and accurate system? So many companies are still using paper timesheets that need to be pored over manually and entered into a payroll database by hand. Or else offices assume that managers will know who’s in or not, which can cause havoc during fire drills or in keeping track of productivity.  There’s too much room in that system for human error – not to mention illegible handwriting! 

    

   Here at Time and Attendance Southern, we can offer you a wide range of products, both hardware and software, which could improve or replace your existing systems. 

    

   How about our clocking terminal? All you have to do is hold your smartcard in front of the reader and it recognises you, thanks to the radio frequency technology. 

    

   Since you don’t have to touch or swipe the card against a surface, there is very little wear and tear or problems caused by dust accumulation. It even works through a wallet, as long as the surface isn’t metallic. The cards have theoretically infinite lifespan, because they don’t need batteries, and have a durable plastic shell which is easy to wipe clean. 

    

   The clocking terminal has more functions than just clocking in and out. For example, you can check your holiday allowance or flexitime hours, or book onto a particular job. One very useful feature for management is that the terminal can send details of who has clocked in or out to a printer as part of a fire drill, meaning that there’s no more need for paper registers and roll-calling like schoolchildren. 

    

   For more information about the clocking terminals, smartcards or our large range of other time and attendance management products, please get in touch.

9. South-West has joint second highest absence rates in Britain

   26th July 2018 3:45 pm Leave a Comment

   A report from the HR website XpertHR shows that median sickness absence rates in the South-West were 2.8% in 2017, which is joint with the North-West and only beaten by Wales at 3%. (The others were the North East and Scotland jointly with 2.5%, South East at 2.3% and London at 2%.) Absence rates are highest in large organisations and in the public sector. The survey was based on responses from 287 organisations with a combined workforce of 398,453 employees.

   The median number of days lost to employee taking sick leave in 2017 had decreased by 1 day from the 2016 results. Although an encouraging result in the right direction, 5.6 days lost per employee is the level that has held sway since 2010. With sickness absence a constant problem, the need for clear and comprehensive absence management is obvious.

   Financially the survey found the median cost to employers of these absences rose from £455 to £570 in 2017. This is considered to be an unrepresentative result as many companies will only be counting any salary costs and not taking into account other factors such as reduced levels of customer service, slowed production times and missed business opportunities. To get a truly accurate picture of your company’s cost of sickness absence, your absence management procedures need to have a way to record as much detail as possible of your employee absences.

   XpertHR Senior HR Practice Editor Noelle Murphy said:

   “Sickness absence has a direct impact on business, and employers are consistently interested in initiatives to measure, manage and tackle the problem. But many HR departments fall at the first hurdle – not knowing the true cost of absence or the reasons underlying it. Better measurement of sickness absence and its associated costs should in turn make it easier to persuade managers to engage with absence management initiatives.”

   Here at Time and Attendance South West, we have the ideal product for you to finally get the full picture of your sickness absences and how to manage them.

   Our flagship WinTA.NET is an integrated workforce management solution, with several features which make it ideal for absence management. It incorporates a dedicated Absence Planning and Entitlement Management feature, as well as allowing the creation of individual shift patterns, absence allowances, and job costings. Not only can you see exactly who is absent and when, but you can also analyse the data to start working out how much their absence has cost you in lost productivity.

   Our comprehensive but user-friendly software comes pre-loaded with a graphical calendar charts that provide a clear and colourful way of viewing an individual’s or a department’s absence records, with different colours for different types of absences. This is useful for you to spot obvious patterns in the absences, but it can also be useful for the employee too, who may genuinely not have realised the pattern in their sickness absences and could then address it.

   WinTA.NET would rapidly identify missing employees that are expected to be at work and then inform you via automatic email reporting. This enables you to address problems virtually as they happen, rather than finding out through more indirect methods and possibly days later depending on the structure of your workforce.

10. Relocating for growth? Then it’s time to review your time and attendance system

    11th July 2018 10:11 am Leave a Comment

    Companies that are relocating in order to enable further business and staff growth should also take the time to review their existing time and attendance arrangements, and decide whether they are still suitable for new premises – or whether an upgrade might be indeed required.

    The latest example of such a company is Ecodesk, an environmental, social and governance data business that provides information for companies to improve their sustainability performance, particularly along supply chains.

    The company is the sixth new arrival at the office space on Bath Road, BS4 since the Bath Road Studios underwent a rebrand and extensive refurbishment last year.

     

    Ecodesk works for major pharmaceutical, FMCG, retail and manufacturing firms to collect data from around 12,000 supplier organisations which helps their clients make smarter decisions that reduce risk.

     

    Damien Smith, chief executive of Ecodesk, said: "We selected Bristol as a place to stage our next phase of growth primarily because of its strategy to position itself as a hub for greentech business, and with most of our development team living in the city it was the logical choice.

     

    "After six months of looking for a smart, affordable and well-located office space with a contemporary feel, we were fortunate to be recommended the room at HERE and from that point on the decision was an easy one.

     

    "It’s a landmark building with all the facilities we’d expected, and a great team to make you feel very welcome."

     

    Every firm that plans to take on more staff in a solid and sustainable manner should also consider the implementation of a solid and reliable workforce management system, and this is exactly where Time & Attendance South West can help.

     

    Whether we’re talking about simple access control solutions or more complex systems, also including extensive Time and Attendance features, Time & Attendance South West has the necessary expertise to provide customers with a complete and comprehensive bespoke solution, that will perfectly fit their requirements.

     

    Our advanced smart card time and attendance system includes European Working Time Directive checking and reporting, ensuring that your company remains compliant with both regional and national legislation.

     

    Furthermore, the system also offers a series of additional features employers would certainly find handy, such as Weekly Clock Card, Payroll Summary, Absence Summary, Fire Roll Call or Shift Swapping.

     

    If you’d like to find out more about the extensive range of solutions supplied by Time & Attendance South West, just get in touch with our dedicated product team, they’ll be more than happy to answer any and all queries you might have.