English for Written Business Communication LD11

Stanley Kent Purnama / 2301852070

ATTENDANCE VERIFICATION MOBILE APPLICATION

An Alternative Method for Attendance Verification
By
Stanley Kent Purnama
Objective
To provide an alternative method for employees to register their attendance in the office, in the
case that they lost, broke, or forgot to bring their magnetic card to the office.

Summary
Nowadays, most office employees register their attendance in their workplace by using magnetic
cards by attaching or swiping them on a magnetic card reader then manually input their password
number on the machine, some companies even still manually write their attendance on paper.

While this method works just fine most of the time, there are still times where employees forgot
to bring their magnetic cards, accidentally broke their magnetic cards, or lose it somewhere they
can’t remember, which means they can’t register their attendance for the day and they’d have
to report their attendance to the administration. While it may not be too much of a problem for
them, it would certainly cause a bit more problem when managing data that are related to the
employees’ worktime and determining their punctuality in the company. Because there’s always
a possibility that the employee will give false arrival time or false departure time to the
administration, and to determine whether or not they give the right time of arrival and
departure, we’d have to look at the security recordings which takes too much time and energy.

Developing a mobile application that allows employees to register their attendance in the office
by simply attaching their smartphones to the attendance reader machine would certainly make
it much easier to collect their attendance data, because almost everyone nowadays own at least
one smartphone, and it’s something that people bring with them wherever they go without the
need to be reminded.
Proposal
Develop a mobile application that’s designed to register employees’ time of arrival and time of
departure to simplify managing their worktime data and performance data.

Position
Currently almost every office utilizes magnetic cards and magnetic card readers for employees
to register their time of arrival and time of departure, those who doesn’t bring their magnetic
cards would need to report to the administration.

Problem
While a mobile application does make gathering employee’s worktime data much easier and less
likely for them to lose or break their attendance device, we would need to pay quite an amount
of money to hire developers that will develop the application and testers to run the prototype,
see if it works well and if it still has any bugs to be dealt with. Not to mention that the application
might need require improvements and updates from time to time.

Another problem that we might come across is that, if employees can register their attendance
(Time of arrival and time of departure) from their phones, and the application simply needs a
login to access the employee’s profile, then other employees can access other employee’s profile
and register their attendance even though they’re not really in the office, meaning we’d have to
make some sort of security system that allows each account to only run in one mobile device,
and signing in on another device would permanently disable their account on the previous mobile
device, so employees can move their account to another smartphone in case they get a new one,
but they can’t give their account to other employees.

Possibilities
Once this application has already been developed and implemented in offices, it’s most likely
that they’ll depend on this particular application every single day to register their attendance.
But there’s always a possibility that there might still be a bug within the application. If that
happens on a day where most of the employees didn’t bring their magnetic cards and are already
quite dependent on this application, then a lot of worktime is going to be wasted because almost
all of the employees would need to report to the administration to register their attendance on
that day. Which is why it is very important to ensure that all aspects of the application has been
tested and runs smoothly before implementing it in offices.

There’s also a possibility that some employees might not understand how to use the application
properly due to it being new around the office or they’re just not too familiar with technology. In
this case, it would be wise to create and share a tutorial video on how to properly use the
application or put up a poster around the office that explains how the new attendance
application works to ensure that all data regarding the employees’ worktime are stored.

Proposal
Seeing as how most companies are already using the magnetic card and magnetic card reader for
quite some time, it’d make sense if employees would rather stick with the current method for
their attendance registration, but having an alternative method / solution to register their time
of arrival and time of departure would certainly be beneficial for everyone. In the case that they
forgot to bring their magnetic card, accidentally broke it, or simply lost it somewhere, they can
just attach their phone to the attendance reader machine, which saves them time to report to
the administration and simplify the administration’s work as well.

However, due to the fact that the mobile application might still have some bugs, or it might run
into some problems because of the connection, it might not be the best idea to have this method
replace the magnetic card as the main method for attendance verification. So, companies should
start implementing this new application as soon as it’s developed and gone through the
necessary tests, but keep the magnetic cards as an obligation just in case the application run into
some problems or is currently under maintenance.