Chuck Those Registers – Manage Your Staff at Your Fingertips

Managing a large number and different categories of staff and labour is one of the most pressing concerns of the administration of most organisations across industries and sectors.

Factories, hotels, schools, etc. still rely largely on paper registers to keep records for crucial staff-management activities such as hourly or monthly payments, tracking repeat visitors, etc. Result – stacks of registers lying around with mostly unusable data, which is also prone to theft, loss, misuse, or manipulation.

At best, a typical visitor management system consists of capabilities limited to only recording visitor details – no different from a glorified version of Excel sheets barely substituting paper registers.

On the other hand, an intelligent premises management system eliminates all of the problems related to manual registers as well as PC and on-premise system-based VMSs and offers a lot more by completely digitising staff and labour management.

Let’s see how:

• Entry and exit of all staff and labour is automaticaly recorded, be they just a few or hundreds and thousands. Data is pushed to the cloud and stored securely. Validity date is set for all staff. Payments, be it hourly or monthly, is hassle free for all categories of staff and labour. Example: A large hotel hires external vendors for their labour requirements. But manual record keeping on a daily, leave alone on an hourly, basis by the management is error prone. This results in miscalculations in payments. As soon as the hotel implements an intelligent  premises management system (a visitor management system), each and every detail of the entry and exit of staff, be they internal or external, is on record – viewable at all times, from anywhere.

• All staff and labour, be they short term or long term, can be categorised into different labels as required – middle or top management, teachers at school, houskeeping staff, helpers, cooks, factory workers, delivery boys, labour from specific vendors, etc. Example: Management in a factory is always in the know of the presence / absence, entry / exit, of their labour as well as the middle management employees. The details are accessible on the management console in real-time. They view the entry / exit statistic once in a week and easily spot aberrant behaviour, such as labour proxy issues. A system of penalty for such practices was put in place and this has resulted in the prevention of malpractices over a short period of time.

• Members of the staff are given temporary or long term passes. They can be either print-based passes, epasses, QR-based passes, or NFC cards. Paper-based passes cost only about 10-15 paisa per pass. Some organisations opt for self-registered entries through kiosks. Example: A commercial center has thousands of repeat visitors – staff – on a daily basis. They enable self-entry through epasses. An international school with multi-location presence has provided their staff and regular visitors with reusable NFC cards.

• The relevant personnel at the administration or management level receives notifications as soon as any staff or labour makes an entry or exit. Example: A residential apartment uses this feature for the benefit of household residentials who need to know the entry and exit of their domestic helpers.

• Details of staff and labourers cannot be accessed by anyone except authorised personnel as data is pushed to the cloud. Even the security guards or receptionists who handle the visitor management system cannot view details of visitors.

• Staff time logs and attendance can be viewed anytime, anywhere by authorised higher level authorities. Cloud and mobile technology enables real-time access to such statistic for short and long-term decision making.

• Staff vehicles can also be added in the system along with parking management solution. A parking management is part of the intelligent premises system and ensures the smooth management of shared parking. For example, makings parking space info accessible in real-time, be it reserved or fee-based. Manual calculations of parking fees is completely eliminated. Pay-and-park happens on a touch.

• There is no scope for data theft, loss, misuse, or manipulation unlike in paper registers and PCs. All data is secure from a technology as well as operational point of view.