We profile Kaba’s work in the personnel management and access security sectors
Kaba time and attendance solution can help a company maximise efficiency by managing its personnel time, one of its biggest costs. Cape is an international leader in the provision of essential non-mechanical industrial services focused on the energy and natural resources sectors. With over 17,000 people in 28 countries, Cape delivers safe, reliable and intelligent solutions both on and offshore. In 2010, Cape wanted to install a ‘Time & Attendance’ (T&A) system, so the company invited Kaba to undertake a site survey and offer an effective solution.
David Jones, Head of IT, explained: “Our organisation provides services to the energy and natural resources sectors. The nature of our business means that we have workforces ranging from tens to hundreds of personnel working on client sites such as oil rigs and power stations. “We always seek to deliver best practice in everything we do, and one area that is hugely important to us is how we manage our resources on site. Our people give us our competitive edge and making sure we maximise the benefit they bring to clients is a key aim. We currently have a manual administrative method of recording the time our employees are on site and working, using paper and spreadsheets, and we then have to enter this information into our system.”
Jones added: “We were looking for a system to automatically capture the time and attendance information for the employees and post into our own system with as little manual intervention as possible, therefore improving the process and ensuring the data captured is accurate. Plus,we need a solution flexible enough to cover all our major UK contracts.” Subsequently, Kaba was awarded the contract to deliver a flexible time and attendance system that could integrate seamlessly into Cape’s payroll system.
The key benefit of its T&A solution is the flexibility of configuration that allows many different working patterns to be set up for each contract. The construction industry has very complex working rules and payment types, and the Kaba system is able to configure all these rules within the software. This ensures that the correct bonus hours are sent to payroll with little administrative time and cost, and with great accuracy.
Biometric identification will be used at the time clocks, whereby a person’s finger is enrolled into a local T&A terminal, and the template distributed automatically to any other clocks where it is required. This gives Cape huge flexibility with the allocation of their staff. The system will also work well in their demanding and at times harsh environment.
An important concern for the employees was also overcome with the Kaba biometric terminal. “The employees were rightfully concerned that their fingerprints would be held in the system and a copy could be used by someone else,” explained Paul Adams, Head of Kaba Business Solutions. “The Kaba system converts the fingerprint to a unique numeric code which is then stored in the database. Each time a fingerprint is read by the terminal, a new numeric code is created and compared with the numeric codes in the database. The system identifies the person this way. It is not possible to recreate a fingerprint from this data.”
There are 10 locally managed Kaba T&A terminals currently installed with more being rolled out throughout 2010 on Cape’s sites and projects country wide.
Where their manual system could not provide visibility of who was in and where they were, Cape will soon be able to monitor and manage all this information in real time, increasing Their flexibility, reducing costs and eradicating any payroll error at source.
Cape will have an instant overview of who is available and can move people between sites by enrolling them on one terminal while authorising their access on multi-sites.
Kaba have been providing time recording and access control solutions for SAP customers for over 20 years, and already have over 1,150 SAP customers using Kaba’s certified interfaces and quality hardware for Access Control, Time & Attendance and Shop Floor Data Collection.
