Rapid Clocking Project

Why Rapid Clocking?

We noticed that the way attendances are logged to ERP system is not very practical for the majority of employees, why?

Well, the major inconveniences with current way of clocking are with morning clocking:

• You wait for your machine to start which takes a few minutes from your work time.
• Additional minutes are lost if your machine takes long to connect to internet (this happens on some machines).
• You take 2 to 3 other minutes between going to ERP's logging in site and pushing start work button.

There is also the problem of internet connection, if the internet is down for some reason, we can't clock in/out, I remember one time we had to register our time on a paper sheet and give it to the team lead so he can enter our clocking time later when connection is back, I bet the team lead wasn't happy with all the clocking he must enter manually for each employee, also he is human he could intentionally make mistake that will harm an employee in terms of his work hours.

So no matter what time you arrived at to work, you will clock-in at least 10 minutes to 15 minutes after it. Now, this traditional way of clocking made some employees get creative and find a way to get around this without giving up their precious 15 minutes of sleep, they leave their machines on hibernate mode all week except weekends, its good solution but has bad impact on performance of the machine which in its turn have bad impact on productivity of our beloved Advanciens.

Project summary

The goal of our Hack Day project is to make it faster and easier for us employees to clock-in, clock out. the benefit of this project will be great for both, the company and the employees.

Some key features:

• Clock in /out within few seconds.
• Clock in/out even if the internet is down, records will be sent to erp system as soon as the connection is back.
• Employees won't need to leave their machines on hibernate mode, so the life expectancey and performance of the machines expands.

From our first exploratory search, we formalized some architectural and technical choices to implement a solution that will make us clock in out within few seconds with the company’s ERP keeping the records. To summarize it, we can say that the solution has basically three layers or tiers:

• Terminal: could be an Access control terminal and/or iOS/Android app, some ACT communicates the clocking information either on TCP/IP or USB, it should be easy to get these information from the middleware using a socket api.
• Middleware application: installed on server connected to the terminal, receives clocking information and transferring them to the ERP (like the bridging concept).
• Company’s ERP of choice: the current ERP of the company serves some web services that will be consumed by the middleware app to save attendances into DB, there is also the possibility of using XML-RPC, or developing our own module to achieve desired functionality.