Time Clock Management Solutions - How Valuable is Your Time?

The back wall of the warehouse housing your multi-million dollar three-facility manufacturing operation over the years has transformed into a dizzying array of time cards of your hourly employees and contractors.

Each Wednesday your payroll specialist manually collects and tabulates the necessary payroll data from those cards, receives faxes and phone calls from off-site temporary agency contractors, and follows it up with a thirty-five minute phone call to a representative of your favorite payroll service.

What should be a barrage of smiling, money-in-hand faces the following Friday morphs into a angry “brace yourself - here we go again” start-to-your-weekend when Chuck’s paycheck numbers are wrong for the umpteenth time.

Meanwhile, two more employees barge in the Vice President of HR’s office screaming for their missing paychecks - evidently the specialist lost Roy’s time card, and added Fred’s time worked to Ted’s hourly totals. To add fuel to the fire, one of the contractors in your Georgia plant is complaining that his hours were off as well.

The specialist revisits the cycle’s payroll files, locates the addition errors on Chuck’s record a third grader could have solved, tries in vain to find Roy’s card since it slid under the file cabinet besides the desk, pulls Fred’s card from Ted’s since it had melted candy stuck to it, and realizes that the fax from the contractor was cut off halfway through transmission.

The VP then orders the specialist to cut manual checks to make up the difference for Chuck, Roy and Fred; wipes the big smile off of Ted’s face when informing him of the future deduction from from his next paystub, calls the contractor's company to resend their timesheet, and keeps the adjustments scribbled on a post-it note taped to their computer screen which is hopefully still there and remembered the following paycycle.

When it’s all said and done, you can expect three extra bills - a revised contractor invoice, an adjustment settlement statement from your payroll provider, and a third for the classified advertisements just broadcast on all the local job engines searching for a new VP of HR and payroll specialist with some degree of competence, laying off friendly but underqualified employees who have made a real mess of things.

A big headache? You bet it is. Time, money and productivity - wasted; customers - taking second fiddle to basic administrative issues that won’t help your bottom line. Sounds more like a Matt Damon rant from “Good Will Hunting”.

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Nothing will drive the vast majority of hardcore hourly employees living week-to-week nuts (not to mention a boss with other more mission-critical initiatives to resolve) like paychecks with errors. There’s multiple potential points of error in a manual payroll system, from the data capture and entry, to the payroll and tax calculations, and eventual delivery.

An automated time clock management solution from Thinlabs can solve many of those problems, minimizing the number of internal headaches and maintaining employee morale while maximizing overall productivity:

  • Custom Software Services - Thinlabs will partner with your time clock management software provider to create a custom solution that is both employee and administration friendly.
  • Rapid Deployment - Software and updates can be remotely deployed with minimal down time away from the shop floor using Thinlabs Device Manager 4.0, our powerful remote device management tool.
  • Data Security - Entries from Thinlabs all-in-one thin clients and zero clients will be automatically stored on a secure data server, far away from the volatile manufacturing environment.
  • Multi-Level Authentication - Thinlabs thin clients can digitally capture employee data for instantaneous future employee ID verification with multi-level authentication from a variety of devices, including biometric access readers, bar code readers, mag stripe readers and more.
  • Increased Touch Screen Durability - Thinlabs Industrial All-in-One Thin Clients feature an IR Touch Screen with a high-grade 7H Hardness Rating, along with optional tempered, shatter-proof glass for increased durability. Workers can simply enter their employee code when checking in, taking breaks, or heading home for the evening.
  • Conformal Coating - Thinlabs Industrial Thin Client Computers are designed to handle humid environments filled with dirt and residue, reducing system wear when Chuck puts his grimy hands on top of the system when reporting for work.
  • Power Over Ethernet technology - Thinlabs computers come with optional POE 802.3at+ technology running network and power over a single Ethernet cable, greatly reducing electrical expenses. Instead of being 6’ away from an outlet or having multiple extension cords daisy-chained, now systems can run comfortably setup up to 100 meters away from a POE switch or injector without a power supply and cable.

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Contact a Thinlabs representative today for more information on how you can implement your time clock management solution.