28 Jul
Lot of attendance management solutions available in the market do a decent job capturing data. What these solutions lack is a good visualization framework that can covert this data into actionable insights and information. In this article, we discuss the challenges with data analysis of existing attendance solutions and highlight how Arvi selfie check is overcoming these challenges.
The Data Challenge
Two biggest attendance solutions available today are biometric attendance systems and RFID tag based attendance systems. Both these solutions are implemented by independent consultants and software integrators who customize existing hardware from OEM’s. Such customizations also extend to the software side and end-users typically get a localized software that does not enjoy the benefits of new-age, cloud based solutions. Here are some key challenges of extremely localized and customized implementations.
- Data latency: Data collected by hardware is not transmitted to the servers in real-time. End-users have a frustrating experience as the dashboards they see are out-of-sync with the data actually collected by the device. This delay could be hours or days or in some old-systems, end-users are expected to manually insert a thumb-drive and extract data from hardware.
2. Lack of data visualization: Data once captured needs to be represented in an intuitive manner that leads to actionable insights. Existing solutions have a poor visualization layer that severely undermines the potential of an attendance management system.
3. Difficulty in inputting roster: Companies need to regularly update shift rosters. Inputting data remotely into desktop based systems is challenging. This was a major challenge during Covid times when only 30-40% of the workforce was reporting to office at any time.
Next generation Attendance solution
- Track what matters
First step is to understand what data is important for decision makers. When it comes to attendance management, each company has its own attendance policy. Dashboards displayed should be consistent with the attendance policy so that decision makers can quickly verify compliance by looking at dashboards
2. Drill-down reports & data APIs
Top-level data is useful but most managers want to drill down deep to get employee level insights. HR managers want to superimpose attendance data onto other productivity metrics such as OKR’s and HRMS systems. Having drill-down data that can be easily integrated via API’s gives the flexibility needed for HR and admin managers.
2. Key productivity metrics
While attendance in itself is not a measure of productivity, HR managers are using attendance data to identify some key metrics including average work hours, peak overtime periods, periods where employees check-in late, work-from-home patterns etc.
Arvi Selfie Check
Arvi selfie check is a fully cloud-native, face-recognition based attendance, time and location tracking solution that is easy to deploy, maintain and manage. Arvi selfie-check runs on android mobile/tablets and is vastly superior to existing biometric attendance and RFID based attendance solutions prevailing in the market today. One key reason is the reporting, data transfer and dashboarding capabilities of arvi.
Dashboarding: Arvi gives a real-time dashboard of number of employees working, work-from-home employees, number of employees on leave etc. Employees can check-in from their own mobile phones from anywhere by simply opening the app & recording their face. Once data flows to the cloud, it is instantly updated across all dashboards.
Calendar wise trends for each day & a drill-down report for every employee is easily available at a click of a button.
Data API’s: Arvi provides REST API’s that can integrate every detail recorded and analysed by the system. We’ve already integrated with multiple HRMS providers and our API’s give complete flexibility to our end users to implement the system anyway they like.
EXCEL reporting: A lot of HR managers are comfortable downloading data to a spreadsheet. ARVI selfie check provides over 16 reports that can be easily downloaded into an EXCEL format. Users can even slice and dice data and generate custom excel reports as they see fit.
