Companies need to take advantage of modern technology
Dyson, a company best-known for its vacuum cleaners, intends to build its first electric car by 2020, and needs at least another 300 engineers to do so.
There are already 400 employees working on the battery-powered car project, and they have doubled the number of scientists working on the battery programmes. Dyson experienced a 27% rise in earnings over 2017.
The team working on this electric car will be moving to Dyson’s new research and development base in Hullavington in Wiltshire. The manufacturing location for the car is not yet decided. Possible locations include the UK, Singapore, Malaysia and China.
The company praised high demand in Asia, with founder James Dyson saying people in those countries had "an extraordinary enthusiasm for technology that works". This was described as the main factor behind their 2017 increase in earnings.
The founder also said that Dyson had “moved on” from an alleged breach of confidential information by a former chief executive, which was settled out of court. The new chief operating officer is Jim Rowan.
An influx of 300 engineers is a very large workforce to obtain, retain and manage. While we hope that a company as large and successful as Dyson does use technology in people management processes to maximise their efficiency, here at Time and Attendance South West we have seen companies with hundreds of employees who don’t take advantage of what is out there.
The example that we come across most often is employers who still rely on paper timesheets to record their employees’ working hours. This has a whole host of disadvantages: everything from payroll inefficiency to wasting managers’ time, to leaving themselves wide open for fraudulent timesheet entries.
Our time and attendance system is an excellent replacement for this kind of manual arrangement, removing the majority of the opportunity for human error. No more employees forgetting their timesheets, and no more mistakes when entering the handwritten data into the payroll program.
All the employees have to do is clock in and out. This could be at the start and finish of their day, including breaks, or any time that they leave the building.
If they work remotely, they can use our web-and-mobile-based Self Service Module for clockings, which in mobile form can be used to plot the remote worker’s location in clocking time using GPS. If they work in a set space, such as an office or production facility, then you can provide them with our physical clocking terminals. These are operated by either radio-frequency smart-cards/key fobs or biometrics (fingerprint or hand geometry).
The time data collected from the card/biometric readers are sent straight to the central system, which has a familiar and easy to use Windows format. This means that there is no need to worry about missing timesheets at the end of the month – the data is right at your fingertips in virtually real-time.
Processing the data for payroll is easy too – it can be exported straight from the WinTA.NET system in a format which is suitable for all leading payroll programs.