Up-and-coming, yet powerful technologies including Mobility, Cloud, BI, Automation, et al have started to penetrate deep into the Time & Attendance Management Software solutions market. These are also the trends to watch out for this year that can innovate time management solutions.
Smart, built-in mobile tools:
There’s been a pressing need to develop built-in mobile tools which means existing software solutions should lend functionality-rich UI/UX experience that can enable users to work on timesheets remotely, with full interface to mission-critical business functions such as project management (PM) or accounting system.
Centralized, secure cloud services:
Global connectivity is the interconnection of employees accessing time management data from different locations, each having its own set of security restrictions and privacy caps. The penetration of centralized, secure cloud services may break physical barriers as they allow enterprises to work only in the cloud, whilst at the same time centrally control and manage their time management tool on premise wherein they subscribe to cloud-based services. Enterprises rest on the capability of cloud services to protect their information and data beyond physical boundaries.
Business intelligence (BI):
An intersection of time management, data and effective business intelligence can improve the overall productivity, and help save precious time, resources and money spent on various tasks. Data analytics is a game changer in companies can easily understand the aggregated time burnt across the organizational ranks and boost organizational productivity. Further, some reshuffling or quick training can help time-recovery and operational efficiency.
Automation:
Automation can improve compliance with interconnected, dynamic and personalized time sheets in enterprises. This two-way information flow ensures relevant info is automatically entered in a time-sheet including employee-related information from a human HR system or a schedule of tasks from a PM system. At the same time, individual employee details such as vacation days or sick time flows are linked to payroll by default, and tasks completion notifications instantly updated in a pooled PM schedule.
Transactional thinking:
Moving away from conventional thinking, employee reward system is becoming effort-based, i.e., a radically innovative system that is focussed on the actual instances during the work day against how time was burnt. This paradigm shift from schedule monitoring and oversight to productivity monitoring, supported by an in-built time management platform that spews reports on workload completion, time and other project-related data is touted as the future.
Global perspective:
With the workforce spread far and wide across the globe, time management software can support a number of calendars running in the background all at the same time so that organisational policies are seamlessly managed with a rule-based workflow. Multi-lingual support is another key feature which allows employees break language barriers. It is even possible to calibrate the software to incorporate corporate lingo or vocabulary, for instance: ‘activity’ against ‘task’.