Use of biometrics, including facial recognition technology, as an identification tool is growing in the personal and business spheres. It’s not just a tool for law enforcement anymore. People unlock their phones and computers with biometric face recognition or a fingerprint. Companies use biometric technology to regulate access to secure spaces.
Now, biometric technology is also a sought-out part of a sophisticated attendance management system. Adding a facial recognition system to your solution provides benefits for you and your customers. Your prospects and customers are likely already exploring facial recognition technology options to improve their workforce management capabilities. You want to be a part of that discussion if you want to win that business.
There are two main criterial to consider when selecting which biometric attendance management device to resell:
- How does it enhance your overall solution?
- Can you scale the resale program without shrinking your ROI on the offer?
This article details the potential features, benefits, and reseller support you want to consider as you decide what you need from a facial recognition time clock to add value to your business.
How a Facial Recognition Time Clock Enhances Your Employee Management Solution
Adding a facial recognition time attendance solution to your system helps your customers better achieve their goals for automating employee attendance time.
Reduce Employee Payroll with More Accurate Attendance Reporting
Every business improves their payroll accuracy by using a time clock to automate the time tracking of their employees. Replacing a manual time tracking process or time card machine with a time clock integrated with your payroll system significantly reduces the possibility of human error and the time needed to run an accurate payroll. The result is a substantial reduction in the administrative costs of running payroll.
A more insidious cost that bloats your payroll is time theft. It is widespread and comes in many forms. One of the costliest time theft methods is buddy punching, when an employee punches in for someone who isn’t onsite.
Having a time clock with biometric options such as facial recognition, requires an employee to be physically present in order to enter a time punch. Thus, this form of biometric attendance tracking makes it significantly more difficult for employees to punch in for each other , keeping your customers from overpaying for labor.
Improve Employee Attendance and Productivity with Fewer Sick Days
Ever since the COVID pandemic, businesses have expanded their definition of what falls under employee health and safety. They’ve taken a second look at common shared resources in the office, like printers and time clocks. These shared devices that require employees to touch it and perhaps have to wait with other employees to use it are seen as potential sources for transmitting disease.
When employees can punch in and out at a facial recognition time clock, they touch the shared device far less frequently. With fewer employees touching the time clock and touching it less often, the transmission risk level decreases, contributing to a healthier work environment.
With employees taking fewer sick days, teams stay more productive and fewer resources are expended managing schedules to accommodate unexpected absences due to illness.
Other recognition biometric time clocks, like fingerprint or handprint, rely on employees to touch the time clock to track attendance.
Signs of a Well-Designed Facial Recognition Time Clock System
You’ll find great variety in time clocks and not all time clocks are built to support biometric facial recognition. As you compare devices to resell as a face recognition time clock, look for this collection of time clock hardware and face recognition software features.
Hardware for facial recognition time clock:
- Large, high-definition screen so the facial scanning process can be done easily and without making placement for the employee
- High processing speed and large memory so the facial recognition authentication process happens quickly.
- Presence sensor that “wakes” up the time clock when an employee is in proximity, which further reduces how often an employee needs to touch the attendance
Face recognition attendance software:
- Diminishes chances the authentication process will return false results in multiple ways
- Collects a high volume of facial recognition data points from multiple angles.
- Provides on-screen guidance to help employees stand in the best place for the facial recognition software to get the scan it needs to authenticate the employee.
- Provides enhanced security through the algorithm and encryption process used to convert facial mapping data points into a secure data string (biometric template).
- Supported by a middleware layer that simplifies biometric template management by making it easy to add and remove biometric templates to different time
- This is especially useful for large and enterprise companies that have employees in multiple locations, so they can distribute only the employee biometric templates to the time clocks at any location.
- Managing how many biometric templates are stored on a single employee time clock ensures that the clock’s biometric authentication process continues to run at optimum speed.
Making a Face Recognition Time Attendance System Lucrative
Demand is there for biometric employee management tools, especially for attendance management. When deciding which face recognition system to resell, the value it offers your customers in one half of the equation. The other, equally important, half is the value reselling a facial recognition time clock system offers your business.
Here, we break down the four critical issues to assess any face recognition time clock vendor to make sure they are offering you an attendance time system that earns you quick returns that don’t diminish as your resale channel grows.
How Fast Can You Get to Market with the Face Recognition Time System?
The two keys to getting to market fast is to partner with a vendor that can provide you with a complete facial recognition system that integrates easily with your solution.
Nothing will get you to market faster than reselling a complete face recognition system that’s already tested and validated. The only pieces that you need to write are the integrations between the time clock’s face recognition software and your solution. Your vendor should provide a comprehensive SDK and API library that makes setting up integrations fast and easy.
Do You Have Flexibility to Resell Only What Your System Needs?
Some VARs will already have some of the pieces of what’s needed to run a face recognition time clock in your solution. You can get fast to market using the components you have and supplementing them with the face recognition technology provided by the vendor. You should have that option, rather than be forced to resell the complete system if you don’t need it.
For example, you may already have attendance data collection software that can run on the time clock and a middleware layer that can manage communication between the time clock and your solution. If the vendor can provide the tools and support that help you modify and integrate your existing pieces with the facial recognition components you do need, why pay for more than what you need?
Will the Costs of Provisioning Time Clocks Eat Away at Your Profits?
Any vendor you partner with must handle the time clock provisioning for you, unless you want to exponentially increase your resale costs by taking on the responsibility of provisioning the time clocks.
Managing hardware sales is nothing like managing software subscriptions. Hardware inventory management comes with a host of on-going operational costs. There’s the costs for the space and labor needed to store and move the time clocks. Your tech teams will also have an entirely new responsibility of installing and configuring software on each time clock sold. The costs for managing hardware only grow as your resale program gets more successful.
Unless you already resell hardware and have an inventory system in place, your company will materially undercut its profit margin by provisioning the time clocks. Make sure the vendor will handle all that for you. No one at your company should ever have to touch any time clock you resell.
How Scalable is the Facial Recognition System?
Scalability is essential to your company realizing the full ROI potential of reselling facial identification terminals with your workforce solution. Talk to potential vendors about what support and tools they offer to help your teams manage multiple, large deployments of face recognition time clocks.
They should be able to address issues such as how software and security updates are made to all the deployed time clocks and how biometric templates are stored and managed . The middleware layer in the facial recognition time clock solution should automate the management of this work. Without a robust middleware built to manage face recognition terminals, the on-going support and management costs of the time clocks will continue to eat away at your profit margin.
Facial Recognition is the Next Step to Offering an Advanced Attendance Management System
You know that your company needs to evolve with market demands to stay competitive and to continue to grow your market share and revenue. Biometric time attendance is where the market is going. You have a chance to claim this space as an innovator and leader offering companies advanced technologies as part of your solution.
You can learn more about ATS’s Facial Recognition System Only|You™ software, the scope of its functionality, and how easy we make it to resell by setting up a call with one of your facial recognition system consultants.