September 2015 – Time and Attendance

Time & Attendance – making Calculations Easy

Keeping track of your employees time and attendance is an important part of any organisation. Recording this data helps to streamline your business processes and relieves the unneeded stress on both your payroll and HR department. With the use of a time and attendance system both of the above processes can be achieved in a simplistic way.

Time management is a crucial process in all organisations. Without it there’s a very good chance your business wouldn’t be where it is today. Time management systems monitor your employee’s time & attendance on a day-to-day basis. This data often includes calculated hours worked and should even provide breakdown information of jobs, operations or activities – productive and non-productive. The data reordered is accurate streamlining your payroll department’s processes by removing the manual calculations surrounding hours worked (incl. overtime), absences paid or even bonuses.

With the assistance of Elf Productivity’s – absence management module, Ceequel Time and Attendance can now do a lot more than just track the hour’s an employee works. Ceequel now monitors minutes, hours, half or full day absences by individual employees and picks up on whether the absence was authorised or unauthorised. Absences are also available to be viewed by department, cost centre and location. This makes it easier than ever to stay on top of what’s happening within your organisation at any-one-time.

Ceequel Time and Attendance also delivers advanced calculations; such as the ability to identify employees who have a long period of absence – as opposed to those who have sporadic periods of absence often over a long period of time. Elf Productivity’s Ceequel system provides this level of in-depth analysis through the use of configurable absence codes and will even cater for shift-rest-days.

Data such as hours or gross wages can easily be passed from Ceequel time & attendance through to your payroll department.

All data within Elf Productivity’s Ceequel Software Suite shares a single database, eradicating double keying of data. Data is real-time and all modules have access to the same data instantly.

Businesses truly looking for process improvements, transparency of information and enhanced people management should only look at a single solution that integrates Time & Attendance system with Human Resources.

A single combined system contains accurate information on each employee’s life with the business. This will include start dates, finish dates, duration of working day, hours worked. This means that if an employee doesn’t clock in to the system on a day they are due to work the correct absence code will be generated for all departments to see. In addition to this your human resource department has the ability to input more information such as reason for absence, attach a sick note or a return to work form.

Even-more-so a visionary company looking to drive their organisation and maximise efficiencies will further enhance their single (Time & Attendance and HR) system by introducing Employee Self Service.

Elf productivity’s hardware is industry standard and is also designed with the future in mind. Data capture communications are generally TCP/IP and are in true real-time. For remote clocking terminals communications can be established via mobile phone data sim cards or alternatively why not implement both Android and iPhone iClock applications. Not only can you clock using the apps but at the same time as capturing your clocking time – the system also captures the longitude and latitude of the device.

There are various technology types available to collect the data including, barcode, proximity fob, proximity card, fingerprint, hand or face biometric.

If you’re looking for one integrated system that will not only manage all of your business needs but also simplify your processes – contact us today!

Tracking Employee Time & Attendance will benefit your Business

Keeping track of your workforce’s time and attendance data no longer needs to be a daunting task for your organisation. Elf Productivity’s Ceequel software suite allows your business to record and manage all of your individual employee data in one place on an easy to use platform. Our time and attendance system is entirely browser based saving your business time and money.

Keeping track of individual employee working times, holiday allowances and rate of pay can be a daunting task for human resource and payroll departments. Elf’s time and attendance software relieves this stress by devolving the management of employee groups – to the relevant line manager. Line managers have access to a browser based system, allowing them to maintain and amend their employees holiday time and sick leave together with their teams, individual clocking’s. Having this information at your Managers’ fingertips creates a multitude of benefits – including (but not limited to) the following:-

1. Improve visibility:

As a business, should you require you’re employees to clock in and out of attendance and identify those who are working too many or too few hours. Elf’s Ceequel® Time & Attendance Software Suite provides your managers the ability to do just this in real-time, even breaking down this absence by employee’s who are late, manipulating your working guidelines or constantly breaching the EU Working week regulations. Thus ensuring that employees pay data is correct and that the company can correctly report and identify any breaches in policy.

Through Ceequel’s Employee Self Service – Employees can view the same data (lateness, clocking’s & premiums) via any device with internet connectivity and a browser* – removing unnecessary communications with Human Resources.

2. Eliminates the ability to fraud time:

Companies once measured their employee’s time and attendance using paper based capture mechanisms, (requiring the employee to write down their individual working time and attendance). This was often abused as it allowed people who were perhaps late, or who finished early, to submit incorrect information on their time-sheet. Elf’s Ceequel® T&A system records in real time, eliminating the opportunity for employees to amend this information.

3. Payroll simplified:

Payroll is now even easier than ever with Elf’s Ceequel® T&A solution. With all of your employee’s time and attendance data stored in one place, premiums calculated effortlessly and efficiently (with no manual intervention) – your payroll department can, process pay runs in a fraction of the time.

4. Reduces the number of disputes:

When it comes to enforcing your business policies, such as lateness, holiday entitlement and absences through sick – companies who do not have a fully integrated Time & Attendance and Human Resource Management Software – often have difficulties providing the supporting evidence to correctly manage their employees.

With the use of Elf Productivity’s Time & Attendance and Human Resource Management Software companies can have clearer visibility when employees need to be closely managed. Capturing this data at an early stage – saves UK businesses a substantial amount of money – invested in employee retention/replacement.

If you’re looking to improve productivity, simplify your processes, increase the knowledge of your organisation and ultimately save money – contact us today!

Creating an Effective Human Resources Strategy

Creating a successful Human Recourse strategy that pleases all of your employees can be an impossible task for many organisations. In order for your strategy to work, all stages need to piece together and each section requires thorough planning. A Human Resource strategy should always consist of four stages.

Are you struggling to implement a successful Human Resource strategy that keeps all your employees happy? Follow these simple guidelines to create a flexible strategy that works in many situations.

Human resource strategy encompasses four different stages: focus, flow, maturity, and execution. The focus of a human resources strategy concerns its goals and end result. For example, you may want to create a reward system for successful employees to improve morale. That can be your strategy’s “focus”.

Then, you need to worry about “flow”, or the process of implementing this focus. Let’s say you want to give your employees £50 restaurant gift cards if they work overtime to finish a project. Flow helps you decide what cards to get, how to pay for them, and how they will be distributed.

Maturity is the stage where you have to deal with any changes, good or bad, that affect your original strategy. Let’s say that a workplace poll reveals that almost none of your employees like the particular restaurant you’ve chosen. During the “maturity” stage, you deal with problems like these and solve them. Most of the difficult work will be accomplished in this stage, especially if you continue to run into problems.

Once your strategy concept has matured, you can move to execution. Sticking with the gift card idea, this stage might consist of purchasing the gift cards, deciding who gets them, and distributing them. While this stage can have its own problems, in a well-planned strategy, it’s often the easiest.

If you have any more information about human resource strategy, please contact us today.

Remote workers – New EU ruling – the Effects

According to the new EU Ruling, an out of office employee’s working time will now include the hours that person spends travelling to and from their first and last appointments each day. This new development means businesses will now need to implement a system which can accurately track their employees working hours. This will ensure that they are correctly paid and will also help the company to avoid breaking the EU Working Directive.

The European court of justice ruled last week that the time spent travelling to and from appointments, at the start and end of the working day should now be counted as working time. This new ruling applies to workers who have no fixed place of work, for example care workers or sales consultants who travel from home or work in order to attend appointments on behalf of a company.

How does this affect your business?

It is imperative that employees and companies – affected by this ruling – keep accurate information on the time spent travelling each day – to and from their first and last appointments. This will ensure that employees are correctly paid and that legislations such as EU Working Directive is not broken. Businesses, with out-of-office workers, will now need to implement a mechanism which keeps track of the times being worked and the impact of these hours on pay.

Ceequel® clock app

Here at Elf Productivity we understand that this can be a complicated and time consuming task for any organisation. Our time and attendance software is designed to not only simplify the process but revolutionise the way you work. The software can be accessed from any device with data connection meaning your employees can have remote access through a smartphone or tablet. All they need is the Ceequel® clock app available on both Apple and Android devices. The app enables your employees to clock in and out when they leave and arrive home. At the point of clocking, the app not only captures the date and time but also both the longitude and latitude of the device – and records this information real-time within Ceequel® Time & Attendance.

Companies can also request employees to clock-in/out of each appointment or customer site throughout the day accurately collating time spent at each location.

Implementing this system will provide you with a cost effective and simplistic way to keep track of your employee’s hour’s correctly calculating pay and all without putting unnecessary stress on your human resources and payroll teams.

For more information on how Elf Productivity can enhance your business processes, contact us today!

Why Shop Floor Data Capture Is A Necessity For Your Business

Keeping a record of your shop floor production numbers should be a crucial task for all manufacturing organisations. Organisations who don’t have a shop floor data capture system in place risk losing money. This is because these businesses are unable to monitor and identify the weakest points within their production process.

Time is money in the world of business, and that is particularly true when it comes to production on the shop floor. If you have a machine that isn’t producing the numbers you need, then every tick of the clock is taking money out of your pocket. That’s why businesses who are keeping an eye on efficiency make sure that they have a shop floor data capture programme in place.

What is Shop Floor Data Capture?

If you were running a website, you would have some sort of analytics program in place that fed you updates on your numbers: you would know which pages were getting the most views, how long visitors were staying on average, and you’d be able to get instant updates on how your traffic looked. Shop floor data capture performs a similar function, but it captures the numbers on production.

Shop floor data capture is a network of sensors which watch your production values, and which notify you of changes immediately. If, for example, you have a machine that should bottle 60 gallons of milk a minute, but that number drops to 50 per minute, those numbers will immediately be shot to your smartphone or work terminal. Once you know there’s a slow-down, you can track it to see if it’s holding steady, or if it’s getting worse. You can also compare the actual numbers to what you have to produce in order to determine whether the machine needs to be fixed immediately, or if you can wait until the production day is over.

Without shop floor data capture, these warnings often come far too late. With no electronic sensors keeping an eye on the shop floor, you might not know there’s an issue until you’re 200 bottles of milk short, or until there’s a backup in the machinery that leads to a serious problem that can be more expensive to fix. Shop floor data capture is an early warning system, numbers tracker, and data mine all in one, which is why these systems are becoming more popular every day.

For more information on what shop floor data capture can do for your business, simply contact us today!

The Latest Advancement in Keeping Time and Attendance

For many years Employers have been trying to find a way in which they can accurately record and track their employees time and attendance data. Old fashion methods such as mechanical punch cards were often time consuming and resulted in the loss of money for many organisations. Modern day technology has revitalised the way in which companies can now track and record their employees time and attendance data.

Ever since hourly wage was invented, employers have been looking for a reliable, tamper-free way to keep track of what hours each employee worked. Originally, there were simple write-in time cards, and in time those were replaced by mechanical punch cards. These cards made it impossible to simply alter your time, but they also take valuable minutes off of workers’ productivity as one shift lines up to clock out, and the other lines up to clock in. The bigger the crowd, the more minutes are wasted on time clock rigmarole. While technology has advanced, and many businesses have adopted ID cards with swipe-in features, those cards are little more than a computerised version of the punch clock.

Elf Productivity Ltd. has decided to offer businesses a different option, one that’s simple, effective, and which eliminates the shift change bottleneck that older methods create.

Time and Attendance Software

The way our time and attendance software works is that employees log in to your business’ network, and sign in from their own devices. This means that any connection capable device, from a workstation to a smartphone, will allow an employee to clock in. There’s no wasted time standing around a clock, and even better, there’s no need to buy a peripheral device for employees to “clock in” with at all. Not only that, but this software makes it possible for employees to work from home or in the field without losing track of how many hours they’ve been on the clock.

It’s simple, straightforward, and best of all, it’s only one of dozens of features that will help streamline your business’ network. If you’d like to know more about the features we offer, simply contact us today!

Is it Time for your Business to seek additional help for its Human Resource Operations?

In this day and age many businesses outsource at least a few of their business processes, the most common being their human resource functions. This is often because businesses feel that the outsourced company can provide them with a higher level of expertise.

When you are evaluating which business functions should be outsourced, you should ask yourself if you can get the same results when you hire someone internally to do the job. If you do not think you can get the same level of expertise, you may want to consider outsourcing. Today, you will find that many businesses outsource at least a few of their human resources functions. Even the companies who have a department filled with quality HR professionals are likely to outsource at least one of their human resources functions.

Every company will give you different reasons on how they knew when to seek help with their human resource operations. However, you will find that many of their answers will have common explanations.

Lower Costs

Businesses are always looking for ways to cut down on expenses. One of the largest expenses that a business can have is the salaries of the staff, but as expensive as this may be, if there are no employees, then the business cannot operate. Businesses want to find solutions that are affordable, but still allow their business to continue flowing smoothly; one of the best solutions is to outsource human resources.

Minimising Mistakes

UK Labour Law enforces many regulations, these regulations have an impact on millions of employers and employees every single day. When you combine those regulations with other laws and regulations, it can definitely cause plenty of headaches for professionals to ensure the company is following all the rules. By outsourcing your HR functions, you will have help in understanding the laws and regulations that must be followed.

It does not matter if your business is looking for a complete solution or if you just need a solution that will supplement the processes you already have, outsourcing your human resources functions will be sure to lower your expenses, minimise the mistakes, and improve your business’ overall production.

If you want to take better care of your business and your employees, contact us for additional information.