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Those companies who employ hourly paid staff benefit greatly from the use of a time clock or punch clock as they are sometimes known. Construction businesses and service industry businesses however have a mobile workforce and the solution is often a little more difficult

While mobile time clocks have been around for some time but their implementation rate has been very slow mainly because of unsuitable technology . The level of sophistication available in fixed location time clocks and their associated time and attendance software is not easily transferable to mobile solutions and, in many ways the attempt to adopt technologies such as cellular phone connectivity and biometric time clocks into the construction and service industries was always going to be difficult .

There is no doubt that there are great benefits to be gained from a integrated time and attendance system and if the technologies are available and they are robust and reliable then it makes a lot of sense to use them. Having said that  it is also important to let the operational issues behind the need for a solution drive product selection rather that let the available technologies drive the selection.

What I mean by this is if capturing which tradesmen are working on which jobs in your construction business is your prime directive then think very carefully about finding a simple and robust system which solves this issue. Don’t be influenced by the apparent benefits of hi tech but “delicate” products.  If that means that the employee attendance data is not live and requires a site supervisor to download workers times from the punch clock then look for the product which does that the best rather than one which connects to the Internet using a highly sophisticated time clock with inbuilt GPRS Internet connection…because you can be reasonably confident that this will be a temperamental system.

Observations of the construction and services industries is that they demand the most robust and fool proof system available and wireless or GPRS based communications will be problematic.This does not mean that GPRS based systems cannot be used: there are many blackberry and mobile phone based products using a software time clock allowing workers to log their attendance times (and other employee)  and current jobs. These solutions generally push the data back to central software when a connection is available.

The video below shows one of these solutions and its application in the field.

In summary I would advise against over complicating any solution by over investing in technology. Find the simplest solution that solves the problem you set out to solve. If you are in the construction industry in particular you will be aware that building sites are no place for delicate technologies and they are certainly no place for any technology which is complicated   for the contractors to use. If you make it simple and foolproof your employees will use the system and your employees will instantly see the benefits.