Selecting the right biometric machine for your organisation is more than a hardware decision. Because it involves not just the access control but also the employee attendance data. The device should work seamlessly with the attendance software, should help the HR and management in improving the payroll generation and enhancing productivity.
The decision becomes tough, as the market is flooded with 100’s of biometric attendance machines or fingerprint attendance or time keeping machines.
How to separate the bad from the best? That too, in your company context? What biometric features are a must for a progressive company? And what questions we must ask to check the robustness of the claims?
In this article we are putting down the steps and tests for choosing a right time and attendance machine which should be good for you.
I have compiled an exhaustive list of features, functions, software, reports, process, technologies that one needs to have in a modern fingerprint attendance device.
Precaution:
Don’t confuse Access control and the attendance management.
Access control is designed for allowing the entry for authorised employees, and restricting the unauthorised people. It also registers the time, so management tries to use this data for attendance management, too. But experts advise to keep both these things separate, because:
Access is used many times a day, it makes the attendance logs cumbersome.
Access control data and information goes to IT, while attendance is taken care of by HR. When two tasks are on the same machine, coordination between the two teams is an extra activity.
As per the attendance data experts, when access control is used for attendance capturing about 12% attendances goes unmarked for various reasons. It initiates attendance regularisation requests. Extra work for HR and IT, and productivity loss on the part of employee.
Step1: Choose the level of protection needed
While the biometric device manufacturers develop their systems, the miscreants also find out the loop-holes and ways to crack the technology. So, it's important to recognise what level of security your company needs? For a basic security, fingerprint recognition is enough, but for higher levels of protection you should go for the right biometric device with finger+ card, face+ pin or retina, palm verification sensors. And fake fingerprint recognition technology.
Installing the biometric attendance device that has the right combination of functions and features is the key to successful protection from intruders.
Step 2: Check for these important Concerns
A: The Source of the Device design: While most of the device component are manufactured in China, more important is where it is designed? Like, the Apple iPhones are designed in the USA & shipped from China. My study says biometric devices designed in South Korea have better quality & attendance management thought process built into the design, which you may require for a mature time capturing device. The Heart of the device is its sensor. The Korean designed sensor technology is also far superior.
Such devices are found to be employee friendly, and seamlessly connect with enterprise attendance softwares.
B: Sensor: The most vital criteria for selection of a fingerprint attendance device is: Reliability of sensors.
The speed & accuracy at which it can scan the fingerprint or face, and then match for accurate results. The durability & life of sensor is important too, as replacing the sensor because of failure is a pain & a challenge to business continuity.
The new age sensors come with Fake & Live recognition technology too. You must read recent news on how some employees use fake fingerprints, and the companies are losing money as well as man-hours.
C: Make of the device: The employee attendance capturing machine should be robust, built with good quality body. It should be IP65 compliant.
It's important, because in a country like India the workforce often use devices roughly. The weather conditions also varies on a large scale. We have all seen extreme cold as well as the heat-waves in the same location. Only robustly made devices can handle such climate and weather variance.
The machine should also be dust-resistant. Biometric devices are vulnerable to this cause.
D: The default Biometric features: The biometric time and attendance device should have built-in fingerprint reading sensor, RFID & smart card reader, keypad for local registration of employee fingerprints, power supply, internet jack, wall mount option. It should have the capacity to store at least 30 days of employee time and attendance log, and the ability to generate punch reports.
Ask your vendor: Can they at least store 1000 finger templates on the device? Push technology is also a must if you want a modern biometric attendance system. This will ensure seamless information transfer between biometric hardware and the attendance software.
Step 3: Evaluation of the time and attendance biometric machine.
A: Applicability to business: Ask, in what ways the biometric fingerprint machine suits to your needs on these parameters:
Nature of business, complexity of shift, employees working on client sites or onsite employee attendance capturing, terminal wise attendance record and field employees.
One will have to select from the range of attendance marking devices. List of such time capturing machines are as below:
Finger scan / fingerprint biometric devices / Palm based scanner
- Face / retina scan devices
- Portable / hand handle devices
- Wall mount with battery backup devices
- Touch pad with heat sense technology
- GPRS enabled devices
- USB based data transfer biometric devices
- B: Is The Biometric devices modern and up-to-date?
- With technology evolving continuously, the latest edition of biometric fingerprint devices are smart enough to sense the difference between fake & live fingers.
These devices push the data directly on server over the cloud instead of local servers, which ensures real time attendance data.
By attaching small biometric hamster to the mobile & other smart devices over OTG cable, marking attendance with geo-fencing & geo-tagging is also possible.
In the modern biometric devices the master fingerprint templates are stored over the cloud for authentication. Registration of finger template from remote location is possible. And you get a lot of storage capacity on the device.
With high level of configuration available the biometric device performance can be very well managed.
Even Night vision / poor light face detection technology is available.
Choose as per your requirement.
C: Biometric machine configuration: The biometric devices have many configurations. But most of the time, these features are not used. In fact the clients are not well informed about the advantage of the features. So they don't get the full benefit.
A quick check of what must be configured.
Scan ratio for speed
Combination of authentication / authorisation. Finger + card, either or, PIN.
In & out bifurcation.
Device tempering alarm
Push enabled on real time
D: Verified biometric service provider: The new-age business is not only about a good product, but the value-add that the service provider brings to the table. It is also about employee experience. And fast after sales support. A quick checklist for attendance system service provider.
Experience in similar industries like yours
Domain understanding of attendance linked to payroll & HR compliances
Service & support TAT
With the right biometric device, appropriate attendance software is a must. An integrated attendance system is future. Companies have now started specialising in only enterprise attendance solution.
In my 10+ years of experience working with attendance management system I have seen many clients hooked to wrong devices because they wanted to save some bucks, but are now not in a position to change because of high cost of installation, procurement, training & dependency.
With the new generation biometric devices, the migration is not so difficult & the economies are attractive, too.
If you need an expert advice, speak to us on 9821186599 or email us on dhwani@opportune.in. We guarantee you a cost effective long term solution.
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