One of the most difficult tasks for a business is keeping track of employees. iButtons are helping hundreds of businesses and hundreds of thousands of workers to accurately and easily collect real-time data on Production, Time and Attendance, and Labor Efficiency. iButton users export their data results to their Payroll and Cost Accounting software packages and enjoy dozens of built-in time and production reports. By tracking labor and production cost a business can efficiently plan for a profitable future.
DKTOB Pty. Ltd., an Australian company, has designed and built the DAELIBS iButton data reader to be used in managing community care services. Older people who are frail and younger people with a disability use the iButton as their electronic signature. The vehicles used by care workers are also identified by an iButton.
The DAELIBS data loggers replace hand written time sheets and vehicle log books. The care worker logs on and off in their vehicle as they travel to the care recipients homes. The care recipient signs-on and off the care worker’s electronic time book with their iButton electronic signature.
The data from the DAELIBS logger provides all the information required for staff payroll, travel claims and for client invoicing.
The third generation data loggers with an on board menu of electronic notes will further reduce paper records in community care management.
Where DAELIBS is being used, 17.5 % savings in administration and service costs have been experienced. Fully integrated with care management software, the DAELIBS innovation is a real winner.
One of the service managers, Olinda, has described DAELIBS as “just brilliant”. By delivering their time sheet data via telephone modem, her rural care workers save 10 hours of data entry each week.
When an Illinois cabinetmaker went looking for a new time and attendance system, they wanted one that didn’t use punch cards. Besides the time-consuming, error-prone task of adding up work hours, sawdust from their shop kept getting into their punch-clock’s ink tank, gumming up the works.
The TimePilot system, which features the iButton, was a perfect choice. A swipe card system was considered, but the cards have a much shorter life than the iButton and don’t work when they get dirty.
With the TimePilot system, each employee is assigned an iButton, which is impervious to dust, moisture, grease and pretty much anything else in the shop. They clock in by touching their iButton to the probe on the time clock and pressing the “In” button. Each iButton has an individual identification number, so the system immediately knows who is clocking in and transmits that information to a PC. When it’s time to do the payroll, the system prepares the information in a format compatible with the company’s payroll software.
"I can't imagine going back to the old system of time cards," says Rod MacNeille, the company’s vice president. “We're big fans of the system.”
Parksdale Farms in Dover Florida use iButtons for time and attendance of agriculture workers. Each time a field worker picks a basket of produce their iButton is read by the field manager using a Videx handheld iButton reader. The manager also enters field and quality data into the handheld for each bucket picked by using an iButton incident wallet.
Reports are easily generated showing how many buckets each worker picked, the time the bucket was picked, from which field, and the quality of the produce per bucket. The system, designed by Agricultural Data Systems, has cut the time for processing payrolls from 2 hours to 20 minutes.
