Digitisation is vital for SMEs
Insider’s recent online roundtable discussed the importance of businesses embracing new technology.
Often, there is a delay in adopting new technology due to fears about complexity of training staff or initial costs. However, it is vital for businesses, particularly SMEs, to understand that digitisation of previously manual procedures and tasks can lead to noticeable increases in productivity and effectiveness.
Simon Reid, head of advanced manufacturing at Growth Platform, said: “The dial of the discussion has changed. Industrial digitisation is no longer seen as a nice to have. It’s now seen as integral to your business moving forward.”
It is a surprising but true fact that even companies in the technology sector, who work hard every day to solve people’s problems with technology, can end up using very low-tech solutions for basic employee management tasks.
The prime example of this are manual, often paper, methods of measuring attendance.
Instances of this are numerous, including:
- Paper timesheets
- Visitor sign-in books
- Holiday booking forms
- Fire roll call registers
All of these need to be approved and signed by multiple people, which wastes time that would be better spent elsewhere.
Every time a form passes through human hands, the chance of an innocent error occurring increases – and that’s not even getting started on the possibilities of time fraud.
Finally, working like this is also a massive waste of paper, since these documents are generally only used once before they’re thrown away.
Here at Time and Attendance North-West, we offer powerful specialised software which can gather all this data for you and present it in an easy to understand format. This can be useful for many different departments.
Replacing Timesheets
Our time and attendance management system (hardware and software) takes the labour out of payroll hours and helping HR spot attendance problems by collecting employees’ clocking data and recording it in the central database. This data can be easily checked and processed by multiple departments, and reports can be generated using our step-by-step wizard or advanced reports settings depending on user requirements.
Replacing Sign-In Sheets
Often in small companies the receptionist role suffers, since it is taken on piecemeal by staff members who have other tasks. When not performed as a speciality, the receptionist task can also be very inefficient.
Our Visitor Management System and Self-Service Visitor Management App combine to create a self-sufficient check-in area, so that reception can be left completely unmanned if you wish. What used to be “getting visitor to sign the sheet with their details and pick up a pass and ring their contact to say they’ve arrived and tell them where to sit while they wait,” becomes utterly streamlined into the press of a few buttons.
Improving fire roll call registers
Another way in which an automated system can improve your processes is in the health and safety response to fire alarms. This combines your existing fire alarm with our time and attendance/access control system.
Hooking up your fire alarm to our system means that when the alarm is triggered, our WinTA.NET system will tell a printer (often positioned right next to the door) to print a list of everyone who is registered as being clocked in.
This is much faster and more accurate than the usual method of reading off a list of all employees, or worse, relying on managers to do department headcounts!
Please get in touch for more information!