Enhancing Attendance Management in Firms and Industries Using Fingerprint Biometric Recognition Technique
Enhancing Attendance Management in Firms and Industries Using Fingerprint Biometric Recognition Technique
Enhancing Attendance Management in Firms and Industries Using Fingerprint Biometric Recognition Technique
Abstract: The biometric verification technique has come to stay in the authentication and authorization of
access in automated systems. Traditional way of handling attendance in firms and organizations by using hand
written signatures on attendance sheets or booklets has proven to be very inefficient due to its challenging
instances of falsifications, impersonations and miscalculations. This paper focused on studying the use of
unique human biological anatomy or physiological feature, fingerprints, in recognizing, managing and
monitoring the attendance of employees in firms and industries. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies
were adopted in the research whereas Object Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology (OOADM) was used
in the development of a platform for a fingerprint enabled attendance management system using cross platform
development technologies. The result of this research formed a backbone to the development of a generic system
that saves time, eliminates the crude manual method of signing in/out each day at work and also eliminates the
problem of impersonations and falsifications in the management of employee attendance to work.
Keyword: fingerprint, attendance management, employee attendance, biometric verification, authentication.
I. Introduction
Over the years, research has been taken into the industries for the purpose of enhancing productivity. A
lot of factors has been highlighted as the cankerworm to efficient and increase productivity of various industries.
These factors were classified as human, technological, economic, administrative and environmental factors [1].
The major cause of the human factors has been detected as fraud and laziness. An important aspect of this lapse
is the records of attendance in terms of punctuality, regularity to duty and useful hours put to work. Many staff
have been over or under paid due to inaccurate record keeping of their inputs (in terms of time and labour) to the
industries. By this regards, attendance in virtually all organizations is a very important factor. According to [2],
attendance is second to throughput as one of the most important criteria for the measurement and evaluation of
the performance of employee in an organization. In time past, attendance recording has been done manually
with employees having to sign in and out daily, providing details like name, employee ID, date, time, signature,
etc., especially where enumeration of staff is based on number of days and hours put to work. This manual
system takes little or no considerations on impersonation, falsification and the risk of loss of information in
event of misplacement of attendance records, theft or disasters such as fire outbreak or flood [2], [3]. Another
weakness of the manual system is error in the computation of the appropriate bonuses and deductions in the
salary of employees [3]. Also to maintain the attendance records in this manual approach is a very inconvenient
task [4].
This research main target is to provide a solution to firm’s attendance problems through the use of
attendance management software that is interfaced with a finger print device. The employee bio data and finger
print is first enrolled to the database and then the fingerprint would be captured using a fingerprint device or
scanner. The design will give room for the interfacing of any automated system in the collection and collation of
attendance information which can be used to monitor the attendance of employees in an organization.
The significance of this research and development is to make personnel management in an organization easier
and this is achieved through the automation of the process. This positively affects the economy of the
organization and also the smooth running of the organizations daily operations. Also, findings and research from
this work would assist future researches on fingerprint biometrics. The system would reduce administrative
workload and increase staff productivity, and also serve as a means to promote computer literacy as it would
expose staff, skilled and unskilled, to the computer systems.
The campaign for the increase in industrial productivity has invited, over the years, institutional researchers for
efficient research-development partnership. In the course of this research, lots of factors have been identified as
the hindrances to productivity and were broadly classified as human, technological, economic, administrative
and environmental factors [1]. Sidelining this work to the human factor, fraud and laziness has major role in
limiting the performance of labour.
DOI: 10.9790/0050-0311522 www.iosrjournals.org 15 | Page
Enhancing Attendance Management In Firms And Industries Using Fingerprint Biometr…
The most recommended means of checking this problem is by attendance and monitoring mechanisms.
Attendance will help to check punctuality and regularity to duty while monitoring will supervise the amount of
useful hours put to work. In many institution and organization, the attendance is a very important factor for
various purposes particularly as an important criterion for checking the performance of employee [4].
Attendance taking started with the manual approach of using paper called register [5]. In queuing and delaying
systems, this paper-based attendance management according to [4] is such an inconvenient task especially in the
event of large population, whereas [5] sees it as a very lengthy process and time consuming task. Recording
attendance using paper register is done with employees having to sign in and out daily, providing details like
name, employee ID, date, time, signature etc., especially where enumeration of staff is based on the number of
hours put to work. Some organizations also keep detailed records of attendance issues such as who calls in sick,
who comes in late or who took permission [4], [7]. Unfortunately, the traditional manual paper based system
takes little or no considerations on impersonation, falsification and the risk of loss of information in event of
misplacement of attendance records, theft or disasters such as fire outbreak or flood [2], [4]. Another weakness
of the manual system is error in the computation of the appropriate bonuses and deductions in the employees’
salary[2].
An electronic attendance management system provides a secure and easy way of monitoring the
attendance of employees in an organization, minimizing or even eliminating impersonation and falsification of
days and time of reporting to duties by employees. Attendance management has also been carried out using
attendance software that uses passwords for authentication too. In [4] an attendance management system was
implemented to authenticates the user based on passwords, this type of system allows impersonation since the
passwords can be shared or tampered with or even forgotten at times thereby preventing the user from accessing
the system. There were also some other attendance solutions such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)-
based student attendance system and GSM-GPRS based student systems which are all device-based solutions.
While GSM-GPRS based systems use position of the class for attendance marking which is not dynamic and if
schedule or location of the classes changes, wrong attendance might be marked. in [5] the major problem with
RFID based systems is that the students would be required to carry RFID cards and also RFID detectors are
needed to be installed on the system.
In [7] another technique for attendance management was proposed which enables each user logs into
the system and has to mark his/her attendance manually. The user selects the particular date and courses
attended on that particular day and it is automatically saved to the database. In this event of developing a
comprehensive attendance management system, [11] developed a simple payroll calculator. The software was
developed using Visual Basic and runs on computers with installed .NET framework. It accepts employee
number of hours worked, computes net pay and records all payroll data for subsequent processing then prepares
pay-cheques and payroll ledgers and maintains data on a sequential payroll file. OOP was used in its
development and the system was divided into five modules: employee data, payroll records, rates, ledgers and
help. Just like our proposed system this was also aimed at automating daily operations in an organization and
minimizing human prone errors.
In 2013, an attendance system which can take attendance using Bluetooth was proposed [6]. Here,
attendance is being taken using the instructor’s mobile phone. Application software which is installed on the
instructor’s mobile telephone enables it to query student’s mobile telephone via Bluetooth connection and
through transfer of student’s mobile telephone Media Access Control (MAC) addresses to the instructor’s
mobile telephone, presence of the student can be confirmed. The problem of this system is that the student’s
phone is required for attendance. In case of a students’ absence, if his mobile is given to his friend then he/she is
still seen as been present. So the presence of a student is not necessary but only the phone should be in coverage
area for an attendance to be recorded.
In [2] an embedded computer based lecture attendance management system was proposed. The system
provides an improved electronic card and card reader serially interfaced to the digital computer system. In
another work [9], a web base attendance management system was developed still hinged on the many problems
associated with the manual system. The PIID methodology which is a combination of Prototyping model and
Iterative and Incremental Development was used. The system has three modules namely; the Student
Attendance Module which the admin uses to manage the attendance of the students, the Repot Module which is
used to generate the attendance report of students and the Discipline Module which sends SMS messages to
parents of students who are absent from school and a notification to the disciplining officer of the institution. A
web base leave management system which was aimed at solving the many problems associated with the manual
leave system was also proposed in [10]. The system developed with certain constraints using web technologies
after an in-depth analysis of the existing system and identification of the underlying problems hence providing
better data reliability, more automation and less effort, efficient real time data and up-to-date report generation
among others.
The fingerprint biometric computation can then be use in analysis, derivation and processing in realizing the
following information about a particular user:
i. Authenticated user
ii. Date and time
iii. Pressure or mood
iv. Status
v. Cleanliness
These information, especially (i) and (ii) above are most essential in the attendance registration of a
user and they are the most needed derivatives in the design and implementation of any attendance management
system that works on the principle of fingerprint biometrics. When a finger impression is made on a scanner, the
fingerprint features are extracted, analyzed and processed. The unique patterns are compared with the existing
templates of the registered users in the database in a process known as pattern matching. If the pattern matching
algorithm returns true meaning a user is authenticated and ascertained to be the real representation of the
intended user, the date and time of the finger impression activity is recorded against the user's information in the
database as attendance. Pressure or mood are useful for crime detection and access regulation systems. The
status detection are useful in detecting level of activeness in some mechanical systems where the blood
circulation in the veins and ridge ending are analyzed too. The cleanliness parameter can also serve same
purpose but more useful in tasks that change the neatness of the fingers when carried out. It is also a factor in
acceptance or rejection of many finger impressions in the exercise of fingerprint recognition.
V. Research Methodology
In order to back up the set of findings from the data collection in one method underpinned by different
methodologies, quantitative and qualitative research methodologies were used together in analyzing the effect of
fingerprint recognition in the attendance management of a firm. Questionnaires was constructed and distributed
to target audience, the employee and employer. From the responses, the questionnaires were fine tuned and
redistributed. The corresponding responses call for smaller group of the target audience to be reached out in
interviews and field observations. The result of this direct observations were analyzed and following the
research objectives, a larger number of employee were targeted online with mass distribution of the
questionnaires on social networks and as website polls.
-Problems: The inherent problem in the current manual system were analyzed from the research data as
presented in table 1 below:
Low throughput: The result of these irregularities in the attendance roll can affect the amount of useful work in
a given time which can cause the firm and industries to work with wrong data in their analysis and decision
making since the amount of useful work done will be a quotient of wrong time put to work.
Wrong use of payment parameters: Labour is rewarded as wages, salaries, bonus, surcharge and overtime.
The payment parameters are the amount of time and number of days put to work for each employee. For the
industries, it is a compliment of the number of available labour. From the analysis of the irregularities in the
attendance management, most staff are overpaid. From the statistical report in table 1 below, 22% of
respondents believed that their work pay were occasionally miscalculated. This is due to the use of manual
system which an automated system design should put into considerations.
Inconsistency: This factor would have been the best parameter for tracing the irregularities in the system.
Inconsistent paper signatures were meant to be a validating parameter against impersonations. The question is,
what are the validating parameters against falsification of days and time to duty?. What is the efficiency of the
manual signature validation technique? A fingerprint biometric recognition is hence the most appropriate
technology in this regard.
Wrong industrial reports: An Industrial report cannot be comprehensive if it does not cover the financial
report of the industrial operations. This financial reports is majorly divided along the income and expenditure.
The total expenditure is a compendium of the fixed and recurrent expenditure. The amount spent on workers'
wages and salary is the base aspect of the recurrent expenditure. From the discussion so far, it is inherent to
produced inaccurate industrial reports owing to the fact that the parameters of determining the salaries and
wages of worker are widely falsified..
Increase level of computer illiteracy: This is an adherent effect of the continual use of paper based staff
attendance roll. The use of automated system natural improve the staff level of computer literacy.
Acknowledgment
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