Next in our spotlight series, we take a look at the most commonly requested biometric clocking terminal.
The Biometric Fingerscanner is the most requested clocking terminal in the enquiries we receive. This isn’t surprising, given that Biometrics are becoming more popular (and readily available) with each passing year, as pointed out over on Biometricupdate.com. How does the Biometric Fingerscanner compare to other terminals for the purposes of time & attendance? Well, let’s take a look…
Security
Biometrics are popular because they are very secure devices. The only way someone can clock in at a fingerscanner is to scan their own finger on the device. This means that “buddy clocking” is not a concern at all. There’s no way for an employee to clock someone else in or out on a biometric fingerscanner; not unless they can somehow borrow the employee’s finger (which is needlessly messy and something you can’t repeat!). If you want to completely eliminate buddy clocking, Biometrics is the way to go.
On the subject of security, employees can often get a little uneasy about you storing their fingerprints on your system. That’s sensitive, private identification data after all. Fortunately, when it comes to the fingerscanners we use for our Capture-it time & attendance system, you don’t have to worry about this problem. The fingerscanner reads the conductivity across all those little bumps and ridges of a person’s fingerprint and then turns this into a long, encrypted number. That number is the only thing that is stored about a person’s fingerprint, and it’s not a number that can be reversed to get an “image” of the fingerprint. No sensitive data about your employee’s fingerprints is stored on the system.
Bottlenecking
The main issue with fingerscanners is that they can cause queues in larger workforces. This is called bottlenecking, and is something we discussed in the last spotlight on the proximity terminal last week. Whilst the actual finger recognition time is less than a second, it takes an employee about six seconds to use a fingerscanner by the time they have positioned themselves, carried out the necessary action and moved to one side for the next person. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, and in fairness it’s not, assuming you don’t have a large number of employees all trying to use the clocking machine at the same time. If you’ve got 40 to 50 employees all finishing their shift at the same time, then it will take between four and five minutes for everyone to clock out. If you don’t have lots of folks trying to us a clocking machine at the same time, then this isn’t a concern, however if it is, then you may have to look for a quicker machine such as the proximity terminal or you may decide to purchase an additional fingerscanner to cope with the numbers.
A Real Time System
The fingerscanner is a terminal that updates in real time. When someone makes a clocking, it’ll pop up on your time and attendance software (like Capture-it for example!) within a second or two. There’s no need to download the information from the system onto a USB stick, or wait for the system to ‘poll’ the information back to your server. Every clocking on the terminal updates your system straight away. Compare this to the Biometrics’ slightly dopey brother, the Hand-Scanner, which is not a real time terminal and relies on the transfer of data back to your server – certainly not something you would want if wishing to have an up-to-date Fire Register! The fingerscanner gives you the security of Biometrics and the real time updates of the proximity terminal in one package.
Environment
Some companies shy away from fingerscanners because they are concerned they won’t work correctly in a dirty environment. The real concern isn’t the dirt, it’s the temperature. At Vizual, our fingerscanners are designed to be robust and reliable. We specialise in supplying to the manufacturing industry so they need to be able to deal with dirt and grime. As long as the reader lens is wiped regularly, there’s no problems with reading dirty fingers (remember, the fingerscanner is reading the conductivity in the finger; it’s not trying to take an impression of the fingerprint!), however, the temperature of the environment itself can be an issue. Extremely cold environments (freezer storage, for example) can cause problems with conductivity, so make sure to consider this when enquiring about a biometric fingerscanner.
The Biometric fingerscanner is a tough, reliable terminal that provides excellent security and real time information. As long as you make sure you have enough terminals to cope with the size of your workforce and you’re not working in an environment that’s the equivalent to the North Pole, then you can’t go far wrong!
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