DEV Community: Reena Verma

Attendance Management Software: How can you leverage it best?

Reena Verma — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 06:44:10 +0000

Attendance management is a vital task in today’s management system as manual attendance is not often safe or secure due to the high chances of data manipulation. Thus, the need for an attendance management software arises. Biometric attendance is the newest attendance management device based on the latest technology that caters to all attendance related purposes. It is used almost everywhere from offices to educational institutions to even small businesses. In short, an attendance management software helps the users in a top to bottom record-keeping of attendance data for various future references.

What is an Attendance Management Software?

Manual attendance keeping can drag down the morale of employees and hamper their productivity, as the regular hassles of standing in a queue to give attendance and the pressure on a particular employee to track it is a huge task. To remove the hassles, attendance management software becomes a necessity as that helps to keep track of every detail of an employee during office hours. The software keeps a tab on the exact working hours served by an employee, login, departures and the break time taken by an employee to arrive at the net time served. It also helps to calculate the number of casual and paid leaves of an employee and also the critical ESIC and PF calculations.

Benefits of Attendance Management Software

The attendance management software caters to various types of purposes. Users can get rich dividends by installing any of the attendance software available in the market. An HR can monitor the software and subsequently issue salary based on the exact number of days served. Some of the benefits are:

Creation of the most appropriate and informative reports for employees to perform payroll management effectively.
It can calculate the time-off and shift patterns of employees to gauge their working pattern.
It ensures higher employee productivity.
It ensures accurate and precise attendance monitoring without any unnecessary hassles.
Manual error in timesheet management can be entirely eliminated by the software.

Most Popular Attendance Management Software

There are several attendance management software in the market today readily available which serves a lot of useful purposes. Some of them are:

Kissflow HR Cloud

It is a cloud-based attendance software that enables employees to mark their attendance as soon as they arrive in the office. This is absolutely flexible and moreover allows businesses to integrate with biometric attendance to streamline HR procedures. This helps to eliminate the drawbacks of buddy punching or failures in punching. Some of the features are:

Applicant tracking: Allows employers and eligible interviewers to communicate effectively.
Employee Onboarding: After hiring new employees the software allows them to get a memorable welcome.
Attendance management: Manages an end-to-end attendance of employees.
Performance and Leave management: It lets manage the performance of employees with its feedback management feature and manage the leave requests based on the number of leaves left.
Employee Offboarding: It effectively allows a safe exit from office thereby ensuring a flexible HR solution.

GreytHR

The software has an inbuilt payroll module that manages attendance, leaves and payroll of employees and integrates with the attendance management. Some of the features are:

Payroll: It effectively manages every detail pertaining to attendance and salary payment.
PF, ESIC calculation: Calculation of PF and ESIC is done by the software effectively.
Leave management: The software lets users manage the casual and paid leaves of employees from the data stored in it.
Statutory reports and challans: GreytHR lets users store and operate as per the framework of the standard rules and regulations, and generate challans for payment of cash or cheque to employees.
MIS reports: This is used by HRs to view the various crucial factors like customer and client satisfaction, revenue, etc., to manage the business effectively.

Zoho People

Like the other attendance management systems, this application manages attendance and performs time-tracking through the detailed self-service portal. It also restricts the location of check-in by IP address using its geofencing feature. The features are:

Time tracker: The software helps to keep a track of the time an employee is in office and the time spent outdoors to arrive at the net time served.

Performance management: HR can effectively evaluate the performance of the employees by utilizing this feature to gauge productivity.

Roster management: The attendance of the entire roster of every team is effectively kept by the software and monitored by the HR.

Collaboration in real-time: Real-time collaboration to find solutions to problems is done effectively by this inbuilt feature of the software.

E-signature: This allows employees to browse documents and read them thoroughly before putting an e-signature, thereby saving time and allowing flexibility.

Kronos

The USP of the software is its microprocessor-based time clock to effectively manage time-tracking. The notable features offered by the software are:

Automated payroll processing: The software automatically manages the payroll from attendance to payment structure with great accuracy.
Gain access to payroll: Payroll access is granted to employees for all the updates in the salary and PF or ESIC registers.
Better Compensation: The health policy as per standard HR rules of the organization is done by the software for an effective compensation coverage.

SumHR

SumHR manages the attendance and keeps a detailed record of employees attendance by its inbuilt attendance features. It concisely displays shift timings and duration served by the employees in the office. The key features of SumHR include:

Bonus and advance payment: Festival bonus or any other types of bonus is effectively calculated through this software, as its attendance management feature keeps all records and processes advance payment accordingly.

Performance management: A top to bottom performance management feature is ensured by this software, which helps the employees to know about their strengths and weaknesses.

Attendance: This feature lets users manage the attendance of employees effectively to find the net time served in office and keep a track on timesheet management.

Users need to effectively choose the best attendance management system so that it effectively provides a comprehensive business solution. The HR departments of organizations can perform payroll management operations efficiently and can track from daily attendance to monthly TDS deductions that help in salary generation.

Interesting Features of PLM Software for Small Businesses

Reena Verma — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 13:35:47 +0000

PLM stands for Product Lifestyle Management, and is a system which manages information regarding a product throughout its lifecycle. It integrates and processes the data in the business system, which helps in expanding the business. This software is cost effective and efficient in terms of managing the information of the product from designing to service and disposal.

Product Lifestyle Management system revolves around maintaining and centralizing the data to facilitate effective management. By accommodating new methods of design, PLM systems are making an impact on the progress of companies.

In short, PLM is the science of managing the product data from its birth or design phase to its service and disposal. It has evolved from PDM (Product Data Management), which was limited to managing the data till the production phase of the product.

Stages & Applications of PLM

Following industries can use PLM:

· Electronics

· Fashion

· Mechanical Engineering

· Retailers

· Small Manufacturers

The primary role of PLM software is to act as a coordinator between the information, processes and the people related to the product. PLM plays an important role in the entire life cycle of the product in all the stages.

Here are the 4 stages of a product life cycle and the utility of PLM across all these stages:

1. Concept – PLM system enables the designers and stakeholders to keep an eye on the evolution of a new product. It is the first and most important step as it will prepare the foundation for the next phases of the product. Here, PLM plays an important role in providing a basic theme or outlook of the product to the designers.

2. Design – This stage deals with creating mockups, prototypes and final testing plans of the product so that it can get ready for the production. The Centralized Document Management

System of the PLM software plays a significant role in managing the track record of the product during this stage.

With the in-built production management tool, PLM software coordinates between the entities involved in development. This keeps the team updated and work accordingly for the next stage of the production.

3. Production – From the PLM’s point of view, this stage is most important as the amount of data gets multiplied compared to previous stages. Now the PLM system will have to coordinate between various systems such as Inventory Management, ERP, CRM and supply chains. Information such as sourcing of materials, costs, origin etc. is collected during this phase is very vital and needs to be processed carefully.

4. Maintenance and Distribution – From production to warehousing and distribution of the product, PLM system manages the process efficiently. It also helps maintain the track record of the product’s performance and improve performance in response to market needs.

Features of PLM System for Small Businesses

Following are some features of PLM software that enhance the productivity of small businesses:

· Billing of Materials (BOM) – It is very necessary to have a common source of information within the company. PLM has features designed for team members such as engineers, designers etc. who collaborate frequently. Hence BOM becomes an important feature of PLM.

· Portfolio Management – Portfolio management can help determine the areas to invest, which will hike returns from research and development. During the life cycle of a product, it becomes important to keep an eye on the product portfolio. PLM system identifies the best possible avenues for investment. Next, the organization can track the progress of the product till completion. This gives a better forecast of the future of the product.

· Computer Aided Design Management (CAD) – This is the most important feature of a PLM system during the development phase of the product. At this stage, a product can go through different functional changes and PLM can manage these changes without disturbing the physical attributes of the product. Also, many PLM systems allow the user to import CAD files and data from a secure location.

· Project and Component Maintenance – This feature enables the scheduling and tracking capabilities which makes it easier to manage the product development while allocating resources in real time. It is very important to track the ongoing process of the product to manage the constraints, and to estimate the milestones to plan accordingly. With this feature, you can also receive regular updates on component maintenance.

Hence, this feature allows the user to source the best components as per the standards and availability.

· Quote Process Management – To support the respective teams or collaborators, PLM system gathers information and organizes data pertaining to product design. This feature helps the user finalize the cost of schedule and streamline the collaborative team efforts. Best part of this feature is that it only shares the necessary information so that you can spend time focusing on crucial work.

· Risk Management – This feature draws your attention towards potential risks, which can be managed in time without any damage. With this feature, risks can be reduced at the early stage which eventually lowers the overall cost. These risks are detected and highlighted to you through the real time project visibility, which also allows for initiating preventive as well as corrective action.

· Work Flow Management – With this feature, you can determine the phases of a project and assign the respective milestones. It allows you to check all the implemented and pending changes along with the subsequent effects of these changes. This system provides an insight on resource allocation to improve profit margins as also to prioritize supply to demand.

· User Access Level – It allows setting user access level to the sensitive information so that there is no breach of data to or by your rivals. You can restrict the access of the data to limited and trusted members only.

Conclusion

Data is king in the age of information. Therefore, data management becomes an extremely sensitive issue in the present day. This is precisely where the features of PLM make their relevance felt. PLM’s importance for your small businesses can never be overstated considering your budget and time constraints.

DEV Community: Reena Verma

Attendance Management Software: How can you leverage it best?

What is an Attendance Management Software?

Benefits of Attendance Management Software

Most Popular Attendance Management Software

Kissflow HR Cloud

GreytHR

Zoho People

Kronos

SumHR

Interesting Features of PLM Software for Small Businesses