Time Management via BlackBerry Smartphones

Buckner Steel Erection uses Blackberrys and AboutTime Technologies’ mobile time management software to control all time management at job sites , replacing a process that was handled completely on paper timesheets.

Buckner Steel in North Carolina , with over 30 superintendents overseeing more than 400 employees , offers steel erection services, rigging and crane rental,  helping to build everything from hotels to arenas .

Buckner uses approximately 145 BlackBerry Curves with AboutTime Technologies’ mobile time and attendance software to manage all time tracking in the field , replacing a solution that was managed on paper time cards — managers and superintendents now use the BlackBerry smartphones to clock workers in and out at work locations .

Company logistics manager Mark Mehaffey says the cost of the deployment , at about $10,000 a month, is well worth it in terms of the payroll savings. “You pay a guy for exactly what he’s worth,” he says. “Before, on paper, if you say you’ve worked 12 hours, you may have worked 12 hours or you may have worked 11 hours and 15 minutes, but we’d pay you for 12. Now he physically has to come before his supervisor and punch out.”

Buckner’s original plan , Mehaffey says, had been to deploy a barcode-based application for timekeeping . “The initial thought was that everyone would have a barcode sticker on their hard hat, and we’d just take a picture of it and that’s how you’d clock in… but that technology did not pan out,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter — the way we do it now, just by keying in the BlackBerrys, is more than sufficient.”

The mobile time solution as currently in place , Mehaffey says, simply assigns a PIN number to each employee . “They just pull up a clock-in screen, and you punch in your PIN number and it asks you for your cost code… so you just signify what you’re doing that day, and you go to work,” he says.

The data is then synced via WiFi back to their office servers . “AboutTime’s reporting system is pretty slick,” Mehaffey says. “We can put in a budget before we start the job, and we can look at the budgets daily and see how we are — the accrued hours versus the budgeted hours. We can look at overtime on a given day, or as we accumulate for a given week on a job we can see Thursday  morning where we are versus 40 hours.”

The company’s managers , Mehaffey states , also use the Blackberrys to take job photographs onsite on a day to day basis. “If you’ve got a truckload of joists or something that come in that are damaged, you can take a picture of it right then before you unload it,” he says. “That’s not to say that you wouldn’t have a camera on the job site, but it’s fair to say that every job site didn’t have a camera — and you certainly couldn’t just take a picture of it and turn around and email it to your boss within 30 seconds like you can now.”

AboutTime’s Time and Attendance Software is leading the pack.  With solutions on Blackberrys, netbooks (with biometrics, mind you), Windows Mobile and Palm, they are the preferred choice for collecting time from the field.

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