How to Reduce Operational Costs & Boost Productivity

Optimising the use of labour and resources with time and attendance solutions

With the current economic challenges that South Africa is facing, more and more companies are looking for new ways to reduce costs, increase productivity and make better decisions. Often, the first places they look to cut costs is the supply chain, production processes, delivery systems and even retrenchments. However, what they don’t realise is that there is another way to meaningfully reduce operating costs while boosting productivity at the same time. The answer lies in complete workforce management with time and attendance solutions.

If you haven’t yet implemented a workforce management system or if your current workforce management system doesn’t provide value beyond collecting data and transmitting payments, read on to find out how an automated time and attendance solution could help you realise rapid and significant bottom line results.

Pay employees correctly

Do you have systematic controls to make sure that employees are paid accurately and fairly?

Without these controls, complex pay rules associated with overtime, premium time, government regulations, collective bargaining agreements and company policies can become a nightmare to keep track of. What’s more, human errors and bad practices can result in costly inconsistencies that could put your business at risk, financially and legally.

By automating and enforcing your own organisational and regulatory pay rules using a time and attendance solution, you eliminate the risk of underpayments and overpayments with little effort.

Reduce inflated payroll costs

How much is buddy punching costing your business?

If you rely on a traditional punching system, buddy punching or buddy clocking may be an unfortunate reality that is costing your business. By allowing employees to potentially clock in for their late or absent friends, you could be unintentionally inflating your payroll by a significant amount.

A time and attendance system that uses fingerprint technology enables you to eliminate fraud related to buddy punching. Integrated with ERS Biometric’s Time & Attendance software, ERS SmartScanterminals feature biometric technology capable of verifying employees and tracking their actual time worked.

Shrink administrative overheads

How much time do your supervisors, payroll staff and HR managers waste on employee-related administrative queries?

The human resource department is often the first to be bogged down with administrative queries related to shift management, salary calculations, vacation time and more. This is often aggravated by payroll errors resulting from manual data entry.

The ERS Biometrics time and attendance module streamlines HR processes with powerful workflow capabilities and reporting functionalities that work together to greatly reduce time-consuming data entry and administrative tasks.

Keep control of employee absenteeism

Do you know how much unplanned employee absenteeism is affecting your business?

The cost of incidental employee absence, including the indirect costs associated with disruptions in productivity and worker replacement costs, is something that many companies don’t monitor, but should.

A time and attendance system allows you to gain visibility into absenteeism trends and address problematic patterns. By doing so, you’ll be better positioned to identify and eliminate abuse of time-off rules and thereby minimise employee absence while driving up productivity.

Use overtime the right way

Is unnecessary overtime driving up costs?

Overtime is often a necessary exercise to increase capacity in order to meet output targets or make up for delays. More often than not, however, overtime is misused more than it’s used effectively, resulting in needlessly inflated payroll costs.

Time and attendance solutions, like the one from ERS Biometrics, makes sure that managers have sufficient insight and controls in place to monitor and schedule overtime more effectively – making it easier to determine the cause of overtime use and take action to improve operations.

Want to learn more about how you can drive down costs and increase productivity with time and attendance solutions? Contact us for a free consultation.

Source: Six Tips to Help Reduce Costs and Boost Productivity in a Challenging Economy, Workforce Institute at Kronos

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