Best-in-Class Workforce Management Software from Industry Experts
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Deploying a Time and Attendance, Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Payroll modules at the same time can be a recipe for disaster. Companies should instead take a methodical approach by implementing one module at a time. Too often projects get derailed due to lack of resources, end users were not properly trained and underestimating the amount of time it take to implement various modules of a business automation software. Whether the software resides on the same platform or involves different vendors, implementation should always be carefully planned. It has been said and has been proven true, that the best laid plans can run amuck. So, with this in mind contingencies should be laid out in the event that the project does not go as planned.

A recent article by The Toronto Star “Huge IT projects can be hazardous to your firm”, brings home the point that the size of your project requires careful planning and the allocation of appropriate resources.

Here is an excerpt from this article;

“In 2003, Levi Strauss wanted to put in place a single computer system, budgeted at less than $5 million. But it quickly encountered a slew of problems, including the failure to sync with Walmart’s computers. During the switchover, it couldn’t fill orders, and three U.S. distribution centres had to close for a week. In 2008, the company had to write off $192.5 million against earnings to compensate for the botch-up, and the chief information officer was forced to resign. Kmart filed for bankruptcy in part over an IT disaster. Hershey’s chocolates couldn’t ship $100 million worth of candy in time for Halloween for one year. In the public sector, debacles in Canada include the federal gun registry and Ontario’s eHealth agency, which was assigned to computerize patient health records. In Germany, the Toll Collect consortium was supposed to bring in new technology to collect road tolls from heavy trucks, but repeated delays cost the government more than $10 billion in lost revenue. Flyvbjerg said they were staggered by the magnitude of the overruns and the sheer number of “out-of control projects that go over budget and over schedule.” Too often, managers assume these disasters won’t happen to them, but if a project goes past 30 months, the odds increase that it will happen. He suggests breaking projects down into smaller, more manageable chunks, with firm deadlines of six to eight weeks, with constant testing of new systems.”

Of course it should be noted that not all time and attendance and other large IT projects go awry. If they do, it is important that all stakeholders meet and regroup. Sometimes the best projects are the ones that almost fell off the rails and were saved by a commitment from both sides.

To learn more, contact Apex Time Solutions about our implementation methodology and workforce management software, best-practice strategies.

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When bidding on projects many companies seek for better control over how their labour dollars and hours are allocated to those projects.  The ATS job costing module was designed to collect and analyze labour distribution and job allocation information.

The ATS job costing module provides an integrated and seamless method to collect, process and report on job costing data in addition to the standard time and attendance information. Job costing data collection is performed in the same manner as time and attendance data collection. The employee presses the desired function key, scans their badge and then scans the job number and project being worked on.

Functionality and benefits of Apex Time Solutions job costing module include:

The real-time visibility saves money through more efficient monitoring and administration, but also allows supervisors to anticipate and eliminate production bottlenecks.

Our system calculates the hours and costs of payroll in environments with complex business rules, including incentive pay policies. It is extremely configurable and is affectivity date-driven. When policies change, the software is flexible enough accommodate these changes.

Job Tracking Terminals uses input devices such as barcode and laser scanners for on-floor data collection. The job costing report allows sorting on all grouping levels, producing thousands of possible report combinations.

Job transfers can be tracked to many different levels. This job module can be set to several different configurations, allowing for single and/or multiple jobs at any period.

Time and Attendance reports can be combined with job costing reports. Writer module available for user defined reports.

 The ATS job costing module is great for tracking specific jobs for billing purposes, or when employees are paid for working in different departments or locations within an organization.

You can go online and read more about the ATS Job costing and Labour Distribution module.

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The tracking of overtime or lack thereof has become a hot button issue for many companies in recent years. Litigators and employment lawyers alike have been scratching their heads in disbelief that some companies either have no policy or could not be bothered to track the overtime hours of employees. In Canada, the HRSDC has created pamphlets of information on “Hours of Work and Overtime Pay” for employers. Many municipalities and provinces have their own set of labour laws which range from banking overtime, overtime averaging and overtime equalization. In the United States, the department of labor has the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)  to help guide employers.

So, is it easy to track overtime hours of employees and avoid a disgruntled workforce? If you are using a paper and pencil, or the antiquated punch clock system the answer is no. An effective time and attendance system is one that automates the manual tasks of employee attendance tracking. In addition, the time and attendance software tracks: vacation, rate of pay, statutory holidays, overtime hours and also serves as a scheduling tool for your workforce analytics and reporting functions. The time and attendance system should also be easy to use for both employees and management.

In addition to tracking employee overtime hours, our system includes the following benefits: 

  • Eliminates payroll errors and reduces payroll preparation time through automation
  • Accurately track attendance, absences and vacations
  • Automate the calculation of time cards and calculate employee hours
  • Reduce the costs associated with purchasing time cards for each pay period
  • Track and pay premiums
  • Optional automatic lunch deductions
  • Provide customized reports to aid decision making
  • Track time against departments, work orders, or other fields
  • Automate the equitable distribution of available overtime to qualified employees in accordance with configurable business rules

Read more about tracking employee overtime with our time and attendance system.

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Many people are aware of Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 or its commonly referred to acronym, SOX. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is an eleven-part document covering all the requirements for registrants of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Important parts of this report include sections 302 and 404, which impose new rules and responsibilities intended to ensure that financial reports are materially and accurate present a fair and true picture of a company’s condition. 

Section 302 requires CEO’s and CFO’s to sign off on the accuracy of their financial statements, obligating them to accept personal liability for those statements; a new and frightening responsibility.

Canada, Europe and other parts of the world have their own brand of Sarbanes-Oxley. The purpose of this is to prevent the type of corporate scandals that have made shareholders of public companies, see their stock lose value, because of the lack of oversight by a few greedy tycoons.

Our Hosted Time and Attendance Software provides rudimentary SOX Compliance initiatives that include:

  • Multiple highly secure facilities with redundant fault tolerant environment
  • Crucial scheduled database backups
  • Flexible reporting from a secure database structure

Sarbanes–Oxley requires that controls are in place to ensure a secure environment for sensitive and financially related data for organizations. Our Web-Based Time and Attendance Software is hosted at a secure server facility. Apex Time Solutions will assist with SOX Compliance by ensuring secured access to mandated reporting is made available when required.

 With ATS Cloud-Based Hosted Time and Attendance you eliminate expensive hardware purchases, license renewals, and any other fees required to maintain your IT system. Avoid all the heartaches that come with manual time sheets by automating your time clocks. The ATS Hosted Time and Attendance System solves this problem by accurately recording your employee’s time punches, and automating your rules and regulations resulting in a precise payroll process.

 Our Workforce Management Solutions include activities, processes, and tools needed to manage a workforce. There is a wide variety of configurable time and attendance solutions that can meet the demand of any business segment, which include:

  • Time and Attendance – labour tracking, data collection, time tracking
  • Absence Planning – managed leaves, unmanaged leaves, productivity
  • Workforce Planning – long term forecasting, variance management
  • Scheduling – optimizing, short term forecasting, shift tracking

 You can save thousands of dollars but still run your business like a world-class infrastructure. We offer a very flexible per-user/per-month pricing structure for our hosted time and attendance software. With Apex Time Solutions, you only pay for what you need.

 To download a copy of our Hosted Time and Attendance brochure click here. To view a demo or to speak to one of our account executives contact us here.

This is a hard question to answer without knowing more about a company’s culture and their environment. Some companies feel it is unnecessary to track their employee’s time since it might be misconstrued as a lack of trust by management. A few years ago, we received a call from the Director of HR of a 500 employee capacity company that was looking to replace their current system. Their current time and attendance system had been in place for a year. Naturally, we asked why. Their response “we installed several finger print readers across our plant and it has been nothing but a nightmare.” It turns out, the plant was a foundry and they had assurances from their vendor that the hardware would work quite well. In fact, the dust in this particular environment was not conducive to the sensitivity of the fingerprint readers.

Apex Time Solutions typically goes through a series of questions to understand which of our employee time clocks will best suit your company’s environment. During the site survey, our hardware technician further validates which time and attendance data collector will work best at the location in question.

Our workforce management software complements: Bar Code, Magnetic Swipe, Hand Punch, Fingerprint Readers and Facescan Time Clocks. Our time and attendance software provides detailed reports that reveal the number of hours spent on each absence type. The ATS time and attendance reporting allows administrative personnel to help resolve absenteeism by enabling companies to take a proactive stance in dealing with attendance.

Workforce Management Solutions by ATS include time and attendance, absence management, scheduling and labour analytics. To download a report on “Recommended Time Clocks” by industry type Click here. To learn more about Apex Time Solutions go to our website.

Deploying a Web-Based Time and Attendance Software is a simple step that companies can take to make sure they stay relevant in today’s rapidly expanding market. ATS time and attendance solution provides companies with an advanced platform that captures collective bargaining agreement work-rules and automates pay policies while maintaining historical work records. Our Web-Based Time Management System streamlines operational business processes and reduces exposure to the risks of non-compliance. 

As work place legal regulations continue to become more prevalent and complex – an investment in Web-Based Time and Attendance Software provides a quick return on investment.

The benefits of our Time and Attendance include:

Employee time cards capture employee punches, departmental transfers and job costing information.

Overtime Equalization provides managers with timely visibility into key workforce performance indicators such as labour, overtime, and attendance.

Scheduling to meet forecast business demand by department and job for all employees. Schedules honour complex rule sets involving variables that include: skills, shift rules, minor rules and employee preferences.

Benefit Accruals provide employees and managers with access to real-time balances, which help ensure accuracy across your entire organization with minimal supervision.

Data Integration ability to integrate to multiple systems (ERP and Payroll Applications) with advanced technologies helping to reduce time and manual data entry.

Workforce Absence Request reduces lost time and leave policy abuse by fully automating and integrating leave management policies.

Compliance and reporting functionality that provides workforce management reports with the option of customizing both content and appearance. Our Web-Based Time and Attendance Software makes it easy to create and automate a broad range of reports.

With our Hosted Time Management System, managers can log in to view and edit employee hours from anywhere in the world, from any computer that has an internet connection.

For more  information about our employee time tracking solutions, visit our website.

We often get asked this question. Should we implement your time and attendance on our Server or should we let you host it? Our response is often the same. Let us first understand your environment, your specific needs and how you plan to use our time and attendance system. Once these have been established, we will then provide you with a solution that best suits your needs. Depending on your company each solution serves its purpose.

The right time and attendance software can help transform a business and operations. That’s why we think it’s important to take time to first understand your needs before offering a suggestion.

Our hosted time and attendance solution provides broad functionality, is priced affordably, and is delivered in a manner that minimizes complexity.  The robust features of our on-premises time management solution mirrors our SaaS time and attendance.

Benefits of On-Premises and Hosted Time and Attendance:

On-Premises Time and Attendance Software

  • Control over all systems/data
  • Data is handled internally, by your company
  • Control over the maintenance windows, issue resolution, security and when patches are applied, etc.
  • All components of an on-premises time management solution is housed internally and is overseen by the customer
  • The flexibility of an on-premise time and attendance system provides deeper customization capabilities

Time and Attendance hosted by Apex Time Solutions

  • Low cost for services
  • No need to worry about the technical support of the application, applying patches, etc.
  • No need to have a dedicated IT infrastructure to maintain the software
  • You don’t need to invest in expensive hardware
  • Accelerated deployment – in most cases, access can be granted almost immediately once the contract is finalized

Whether you opt for an on-premises or hosted solution, the ATS time and attendance software enables you to reduce labour costs and manage your labour resources more effectively. With ATS workforce management software you could reduce labour costs by streamlining your payroll process and optimizing your workforce, allowing your organization to save on labour costs.
The ATS time and attendance solution enables you to reduce labour costs and manage your labour resources more effectively. By automating routine business processes, eliminating administrative tasks, and monitoring labour activities as they happen, you can make better business decisions that save your company money.

The bottom line… hosted time and attendance is gaining in popularity. However, many companies still prefer to purchase an on-premise time management solution. Download a copy of our white paper on “On-Premises or Hosted Time and Attendancehere or go to our website to learn more.

 

On-Premises Or Cloud-Based Time And Attendance, Which One Is Better?

Biometric Time and Attendance System

The word biometrics heads the topic of conversation with 9 out of every 10 customers who contact us about our time and attendance system. Despite its popularity,  some still think of biometrics as a futuristic type of device that belongs in the movies.

Biometrics, or the use of biological properties (e.g., fingerprints, retina scans, voice recognition) to identify individuals, are increasingly popular methods of identification. They are no longer confined to criminal law enforcement and the imagination of science fiction writers dreaming of hand-recognition as an automatic door opener and remote eye-scanning while entering a shopping mall. Businesses now use biometrics to regulate access to buildings and information. Governments are contemplating the inclusion of biometric identifiers in passports, driver’s licenses, and possibly a future national ID card. Digital video surveillance is spreading in private and public places.

However, biometric technologies incite fears of constant supervision, profiling and control, leading to a loss of individuality, privacy and freedom. Many people feel uneasy being scanned and are alarmed about having their bodily data digitally stored in large databases along with sensitive personal information. Many questions arise: Can we trust the accuracy of biometric technology? Who controls the collection of biometric data? And who has access to the databases and for what purpose?

The hallmark of an ATS Biometric Time and Attendance System   will help your organization streamline payroll costs , eliminate “buddy punching” and ensure compliance with labour tracking laws. In addition, it offers many benefits including a strong return on your investment.

 To find out if biometrics is right for your organization, download a copy of our “Guide to Deploying Biometrics”  or click on our website to learn more.