Although some people may tire of having so many apps to contend with, there is no question that the usefulness of mobile apps is significant!
Recently, we started a project for a customer that wanted to allow their employees to clock in and clock out on their mobile phones. Despite the many time keeping solutions in the market, none quite handled the process the way our client required.
One of the first questions was, if you use a mobile app, how can you be sure the employee is “actually” at work? Location services or capturing the GPS location of the phone was good, but unfortunately, unreliable in some locations (like inside a building – unless you implement an “Indoor Positioning System”). We landed on using GPS AND NFC (Near Field Communication).
NFC Tags are cheap, about $0.25 – $1.50 per tag. iPhones and Androids can “read” an NFC tag by tapping on getting close to the tag. Imagine this: place NFC tags near your employee entrances and exits (locker rooms, front desks, rear doors, etc.)… the employee taps the tag when they arrive and when the leave or go on break and voila, you’ve got a time clock. Then we designed the data exports for their payroll system.
