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Attendance in a Manufacturing Company: a Kiosk at the Gate, Chips and Shifts

In manufacturing, attendance is recorded mostly by employees at the machines, not in the office. Most of them have no company e-mail and no appetite for more clicking, yet each of them must have the beginning and end of their shift recorded exactly, every day. This article describes what that looks like in practice: a kiosk at the gate, a chip in the pocket, shifts and breaks, overtime, several sites, company cars and one sheet a month for the payroll accountant. At the end we list the mistakes that recur during roll-out.

A kiosk at the gate

The basis is a touch screen at the entrance everyone passes through. In manufacturing that is the gatehouse, the changing room or the door between the changing room and the production site; the production site itself has dust, grease and gloves, so a kiosk belongs there only as a last resort.

The kiosk should run in kiosk mode: a browser across the whole screen, no address bar, no keyboard and no access to the desktop. The screen shows tiles with names and states (at work, on a break, out). The employee taps their name and picks what they are recording: arrival, departure, a break, a visit to the doctor. One tap, no password. Because the kiosk shows everyone's state, the foreman sees at a glance who is on the shift and the gatekeeper does not have to phone anyone.

In practical terms, the kiosk needs reliable power and a network (Wi-Fi is enough, a cable is better) and should hang where an employee with a box in their hands can still reach it.

Chips for employees without a computer

Tapping a name is quick, but with a hundred employees on a shift the tiles take long to find and nothing stops anyone from tapping a colleague's name. That is why manufacturing uses chips: a key fob or a card the employee holds to a reader at the kiosk. The system recognises them and records the event.

The cheapest option is 125 kHz RFID (EM4100 chips) with a USB reader that behaves like a keyboard: when a chip is presented, it "types" its code. The reader costs a few hundred crowns, a chip a few crowns. The dearer MIFARE (13.56 MHz) is harder to copy; for attendance the cheaper kind is usually enough, because lending a chip breaks the rules whatever its type.

Count on a reserve of chips in stock, on a procedure for a forgotten chip (a note with the foreman, not "I'll enter it tomorrow") and on retiring a lost chip at once and issuing a new one.

Shifts and breaks

Manufacturing runs in shifts: morning, afternoon, night, sometimes twelve hours. The attendance system must know every employee's schedule, otherwise it cannot tell a shift from overtime. So set the working time per employee or per group and keep it current when someone moves from the morning to the afternoon shift.

Next, arrival has to be distinguished from the start of the shift. Employees arrive at 5:40 for a shift starting at 6:00, change and have a coffee. If the system counts time from the gate, minutes nobody wants to pay for accumulate every day and a dispute follows at the end of the month. Rounding to the start of the shift (whoever arrives early is counted from its start), and likewise at its end, is fine only where the employee really does not work before or after the shift. The records must show the time actually worked, so the system must not clip extra work automatically; it marks it as overtime, or as time off work if the manager approves it as such.

A meal and rest break is mandatory after no more than six hours of work and does not count as working time. Either the employees record it on the kiosk (exact, but it slows things down) or the system deducts it automatically from every shift longer than six hours (simple, but it must be written in the internal rules). Manufacturing mostly uses the automatic deduction with the option of recording a longer break by hand.

Overtime and its carry-over

Overtime in manufacturing is routine: the season, a breakdown, a colleague off sick. The system should keep a monthly balance for every employee, that is how much they worked against the scheduled time. Decide in advance what happens to the balance: whether it is paid with the supplement in the month in question, carried over to the next month and taken as time off in lieu, or both by agreement. Carried-over hours must stay visible in the records, including when they were used up.

Watch the limits: ordered overtime at most 8 hours a week and 150 hours a year, beyond that only with the employee's consent and at most 8 hours a week on average. A system that computes the balance keeps an eye on them; a book at the gatehouse does not.

Several sites under one company

When a company has two production sites or a plant in another town, each site can run its own system, or you keep all of them in one system with an organisational hierarchy. In the second case there is one kiosk at every entrance, all of them write into the same records, the foreman sees the attendance and timesheets of their own people and the management sees everything. An employee who moves from one site to another in the morning clocks in on whichever kiosk is at hand.

For employees who do not pass through the gate – field maintenance, drivers, service technicians – there is recording from a phone. Only the time and the type of event are recorded, not the location, and the internal rules state that the employee is responsible for the accuracy of the entry.

The mileage log

A manufacturing company tends to have vans and company cars and with them the duty to keep a mileage log. It is practical to keep it in the same system as attendance: the driver records the start and end of a trip, the odometer reading and the purpose on the kiosk or by phone, and at the end of the month the company has a mileage log for every car and an overview of trips for every driver.

The monthly sheet for payroll

Everything leads to one day a month: the close. A routine that has proved itself:

  1. On the last day of the month the foreman goes through the warnings in the system: missing departures, shifts without a break, entries outside the schedule.
  2. They correct them with a note; the correction stays in the history.
  3. The sheet of every employee is approved by their supervisor. The employee should be able to look at their own sheet.
  4. The sheets are exported to PDF and handed to the payroll accountant.
  5. The PDFs are stored outside the system, with the payroll documents, for at least three years.

When this routine works, the close for fifty employees takes an hour, not a day.

What hardware is enough

Manufacturing companies often expect a terminal for tens of thousands. A system that runs in a browser needs only:

  • a 10-inch tablet or a touch PC with a wall mount; an older office computer with a touch monitor serves just as well,
  • a USB RFID reader (125 kHz or MIFARE, matching the chips) for a few hundred crowns,
  • chips or cards for every employee and a reserve,
  • a network cable or reliable Wi-Fi, and at an unattended gatehouse a lock on the device.

Altogether a few thousand crowns per entrance. Biometric readers, turnstiles and barriers are a separate chapter; working-time records do not need them.

Typical mistakes

  • A kiosk without kiosk mode. Within a week someone plays a video on it, within a month it is signed out.
  • One chip for several employees or lending chips. An entry made with someone else's chip is a false entry in the working-time records; tell the employees in advance and act when it happens.
  • No rule for a forgotten chip. The result is missing arrivals and retrospective entries.
  • Nobody responsible for corrections. When every foreman can correct and the corrections have no history, the records stop being verifiable.
  • The sheet goes to payroll unchecked. Errors are then corrected in the pay, which is dearer and harder to explain.
  • The shift schedule does not match reality. The system then reports overtime that never happened, or fails to report overtime that did.
  • Administrator rights for everyone. A foreman should see their own people, not change the system's settings.
  • Employees were not told in writing what is recorded and who sees it. That is the employer's duty, not a choice.
  • Leavers keep an active chip and a valid login.
  • The sheets stay only in the system. After a change of vendor or the end of a licence they may not be available; a PDF in the archive is cheap insurance.

Attendance in manufacturing is above all an operational matter. The kiosk and the chips are set up in an afternoon; what takes longer is agreeing the rules, writing them into the internal regulations and sticking to them through the first three monthly closes. After that it runs by itself.