Product

Feature of the Month: Face Recognition Based Sign In

How do employees clock in at your organization? Does each person have a timecard they need to punch in and then punch out? Do you follow a pen and paper-based system to keep track of who comes into work and when? None of these methods are foolproof. Attendance fraud is a reality for most companies, whether we like it or not. Getting a colleague to punch in for you or coercing the person-in-charge of a physical register to put in an earlier time, we’ve experienced it all.

In fact, this is not just an Indian phenomenon. The American Payroll Association says that companies in the US lose a whopping $15-20 billion each year due to attendance fraud, while productivity losses add up to more than $400 billion. That translates to over ₹28 lakh crores! Have you ever thought whether you are overpaying an employee because they are marking overtime when they really aren’t working longer hours? The problem doesn’t end there.

Timecards Could Cost Your Company

Attendance fraud might just be the tip of the iceberg. What about employees who misplace their timecard? There are multiple repercussions of that. For one, the card might land in the hands of an unauthorized person, who can then gain easy entry into your premises. A security breach could also occur in the form of sensitive employee data that might have been present on the card. Then there’s the problem of the employee reporting the loss to the relevant department and waiting for a replacement. How do they clock into work till the card is replaced?

Also, what happens when an employee leaves? The best practice is to, of course, have the departing employee deposit their card on their last day at work. But that doesn’t always happen. Some forget while some others might knowingly hang on to the card. Again, this raises a security issue.

For an organization with multiple employees across different locations, keeping track of all physical forms of marking attendance could not only be extremely tedious, but it could also be full of loopholes and vulnerability to human error.

The need of the hour is for a technology-based solution for employee attendance checks. At Veris, working with various types and sizes of businesses, we became acutely aware of this. Given that we constantly strive to add new features and functionalities to our visitor management system, we decided that the next feature should be something that takes care of this attendance issue, while also easing visitor check-ins.

Face Recognition Functionality to the Rescue

Everything can be stolen, except your biometrics, right? Just like fingerprints are unique to each person, your face is unique to you as well. And, unless you’re living in one of the early Mission Impossible movies, your face cannot be replicated. So, at Veris, we felt that including face recognition in our visitor management system could close the loopholes inherent in any RFID-based timecard system.

Face recognition software uses various characteristics of each face, including facial structures, such as length of the jawline, depth of the eye sockets, the shape of the cheekbones and more, to determine a match. So, accuracy levels tend to be high.

As far back as 2014, Facebook had reported an accuracy rate of 97.25% for its DeepFace program, while in 2015, Google reported an amazing 100% accuracy for FaceNet and 95% accuracy for YouTube Faces. So, we can say with some confidence that in 2019, when we incorporated the face recognition feature in our visitor management software, that accuracy should not be a problem.

One Technology, Many Advantages

Facial recognition within an iPad check-in system means faster processing and lower wait times, given that it takes just seconds for the software to identify a face. More importantly, it completely eliminates the risk of human error or fraud, which is quite prevalent when security guards to manual identification.

So, while you brand your company as one that is ahead of its times in adopting the latest innovations, it also gives you the opportunity to ensure the highest levels of security within your premises. Integrated into the complete cloud-based Veris SaaS system, with real-time information available on a dashboard, you can also ensure that when an employee is terminated, the information will get automatically synced.

At Veris, when we say we aim to create a turnkey solution, we work on just that. Our face recognition feature is only the most recent result of our consistent efforts.

‘Work the talk’ is an initiative by Veris that empowers businesses to co-create workplaces of the future. In this podcast series, we talk with industry leaders to gain insights about the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities impacting workplaces across industries.