Here are 7 reasons why organisations in India should opt for the Next-Gen touchless attendance system based on facial recognition:

A handshake, a hug or the routine act of marking attendance at work – the pandemic has forced us to rethink social and work-life norms. We are now rethinking, reinventing ways of interacting with each other in social and business settings. 

And this rethinking can only be through new technological solutions. Take the case of recording attendance in offices. Over the years, organizations have tried to adopt the latest technologies to manage attendance, the latest being fingerprint-based attendance systems. These solutions were adopted because of the accuracy of the system, the ease with which employees and administrators could interact with the system and the lower long-term associated costs. 

However, majority of biometric attendance systems use a fingerprint to identify the employee. In a world, where physical distancing is being actively advocated, fingerprint-based identification systems are not the way to go as touching a common surface which is repeatedly used by many people in short time intervals could result in spread of infection. It is time to move to facial recognition-based touchless biometric solutions for attendance management. 

As employees start to get back to work, organizations need to put in place Covid-19 appropriate measures, and Face Recognition Based Attendance System is one of the most elementary change that has to be made for a safe working environment. 

Here are 7 reasons why organisations in India should opt for the Next-Gen touchless attendance system based on facial recognition:

#1 Touchless Entry: A Facial Recognition-based Attendance System does away with the need of touching any surface. The AI Vision-powered system identifies face of the employee for safe and touchless attendance recording. Once an employee’s face is recognized on a device, a digital record of the capture along with the time gets instantly synced with the system’s cloud server. This enables managers/supervisors to get real-time reports.

#2 Ensuring Covid-19 Appropriate Behaviour: There are many functionalities that can be configured on the system. For e.g., during this pandemic wearing a mask is very important to prevent the spread of infection. In fact, organizations would not want their employees to pull down the mask even for marking their attendance.  So, a functionality that identifies the face even with the mask on is critical. The same functionality can also help in enforcing mask compliance in the office premises. Organizations can simply choose not to mark an employee’s attendance if a mask is not detected while recognizing her/his face.

#3 Fast and Accurate: Another useful tech innovation that the system could include is that the system only detects a single face at a time. Even when a group of people stand before the device, the software identifies the faces individually, thus reducing the chances of errors. Each recognition gets completed in a fraction of a second!

#4 Real Person Detection: The high accuracy of Facial Identification-based Attendance Systems also makes them very difficult to fool. It can recognize the difference between a photograph and a live face and so if some ‘enterprising’ employee tries this way of marking a proxy attendance, the system will not recognize the person.  Even if an employee puts on a new pair of spectacles, sports a beard, or gets an injury on their face, the AI software can match it with their facial profile present in system and then mark their attendance.

#5 Friend of the HR department: The Human Resource department too can benefit from such a technological innovation as the data can be stored on the cloud, thus enabling administrators to pull up data anytime. Another feature is offline syncing of data, which ensures all attendance logs get captured on the device even with low-bandwidth internet services, and data is synced as soon as normal connectivity resumes. Additionally, it allows you to view and export all data from cloud directly into the HRMS system.

#6 Low Adoption Costs: Organizations which are wary of adopting new technologies in the fear of deployment costs can be rest assured because the Face Recognition based Attendance System can be seamlessly integrated with existing HRMS software using APIs, scheduled data dumps, webhooks, etc. It can be deployed across different entry points and floors of the same office premise and can also be used across different locations to relay information to the cloud. 

#7 Customizable + Real-time Monitoring: Administrators can control all devices centrally from the cloud and view the data synced to the cloud in real-time. They can also get customised notifications through Apps and SMS. In addition, these state-of-the-art systems also support access control features, which can be used to limit movement of unauthorized people in a certain area.

The author is Director, KENT RO Systems and has introduced KENT CamAttendance, a completely Touchless Face Recognition Based Attendance System.