Healthcare Company Adopts Biometric Time and Attendance Terminals

Published: April 15, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Golden Living, an operator of nearly 350 long-term care facilities across the country, has streamlined the collection of time and attendance data from its 35,000 employees thanks to new biometric terminals from Kronos that plugs into its iSeries Central application.

Golden Living operates a family of companies that each play a role in Golden Living's goal of serving elderly and disabled people, including nursing homes, rehabilitation therapy, hospice and home health services, and temporary staffing services. At the center of this services-focused company is iSeries Central, a suite of time and attendance, scheduling, and labor management solutions, which Golden Living has relied upon for years.

While the iSeries Central software has provided a solid and robust backend platform, the front-end of Golden Living's time and attendance system left something to be desired. Manual data entry errors, "buddy punching," a high level of hand-holding by the IT department, and a general lack of visibility into the hours worked by employees combined to convince Golden Living to try something new.

Enter the Kronos 4500 Touch ID terminal, a Web-based device that resembles an ATM machine and provides numerous functions for workers, including basic timecard functionality, detailed work schedules, time and labor details, and the capability to initiate time-off requests.

Golden Living elected to use the 4500 Touch ID terminal's biometric capability to authenticate workers before punching in or punching out, which has dramatically cut down on buddy punching. According to Kronos, the capability to authenticate workers through fingerprint scanning has reduced its total hourly payroll by 2.2 percent, a huge amount for a company with 35,000 workers.

Central management of the terminals has reduced demands on Golden Living's IT department, while the terminals' capability to process time off requests and display time-card data saves time for the company's managers and human resources personnel, Kronos says.

"Kronos' biometric terminals are providing us access to secure and reliable real-time reporting, which helps us ensure accurate payments and instills a sense of fairness among employees," says John Derr, senior vice president and CIO for Golden Living. "This ultimately optimizes employee productivity and ensures that our patients are well served, which is our primary mission.

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