I've been very fortunate to work for many different sized companies in many different industries. Along the way I have discovered a very long list of common business problems including those that can impact an HR Departments ability to track employee’s time and attendance (T&A).

Common problems are:

Time clocks are slow to clock in.

Time and attendance reports run slow.

Hourly and shift employees are late getting clocked in even when they claim they checked in on time and security cameras show they checked in on time.

Your production reports take a long time to run and at times the information conflicts with what employees state.

Dates are incorrect on time reports.

Have you ran across these problems or continue to currently struggle with them? If you do have them and don’t solve them you can easily have a liability. The cause can be possibly due to an IT issue that is easily solvable. At minimum these questions should be posed to your IT Leadership Team to see if they can help solve the issues or as a preventive measure to ensure that you don’t have these problems occur in the future.

Check with your IT Leadership Team and ask if they have:

Updated the individual time clocks software and firmware.

Updated the network switches and routers that provide the time clock connection to the back-end servers.

Updated the servers that the T&A application are running on with firmware and system patches.

Checked to see if the memory and CPU utilization reach capacity at certain times during the day on the application and database servers. e.g. shift changes

Setup system performance reports to run on a regular basis.

Updated the database with the latest patches.

Tuned, defragged, indexed and archived the database on a regular basis.

Built a mirrored database that allows reporting to be run off of instead of the main production database.

Checked the data storage platform for capacity issues.

Checked the time clocks and others systems to ensure they have the correct time and date.

Ensured that adequate logging is turned on for all the system components that provide the time clock service.

Ensured that log files are audited on a regular basis for all components that provide time clock services.

Ensured that there are sufficient SLAs for uptime of all components of the entire T&A service.

Validated that security vulnerability scanning has been ran against the time clocks and all systems that provide the time keeping service to ensure there are no compliance or security risks.

Setup automate updating of systems that provide time and attendance services.

Tested backups to ensure that they can actually restore data in the event of a loss.

Although, facility security and monitoring cameras near timeclocks are not direct components of T&A, you can ask many of these same questions about those systems.

Bruce McCullough High Performance * Leadership * Results https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucemccullough