Case Study

THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM - Flexible Working Hours

SYSTEM: VISIONTIME

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THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM approached FlexTime with two separate challenges: -

1. To automate the running of the University's Flexi Schemes.
2. to automate the capture and charge of the car park payments (see here)

Flexible Working at the University :

FlexTime was given the challenge to automate the running of the University's Flexi Schemes.

The University had a multiplicity of time systems from various suppliers and needed to start considering some uniformity for the future. Also, as with any large University, the Staff are located over a wide campus. The need, therefore, was for technology, which could bring various technical and functional strands together. The University decided to look into how intranets can be used for managing time at work.

VisionTime was designed by FlexTime to run on Intranets and was installed on trial basis for two months in the University's Finance Department. Now staff key in/out & look up time and holiday records at their own P.C.s and also have the option to clock at a VT Time Terminal.

All updates to time and absence records are now submitted electronically by staff and then “signed off” electronically by supervisors. Before this, a central person needed had to work from paper-based requests for time off.

So the whole environment has been modernised and we are in the process of upgrading the system once more to the .Net version of VisionTime.

General Conclusion

Given the new flexibilities in terms of working time arrangements, which are increasingly being encouraged by governments and are much sought after by staff - HR functions are generally finding that they have to take even more responsibility for the whole "time at work" issue.

To counteract this - the overall automation available in VisionTime saves considerable time for central administrators when compared with the earlier technology. With the aid of the trend analysis output in VisionTime, allied to the saving in administration effort - it is now also easier to manage the usage of the flexi concept. This can, significantly, assist in ensuring that organisational needs are matched with those of the employee - which was an aspect that was often overlooked by earlier, less automated, technology.

Agreeing these new time options, such as job share, work share, term time, home& tele-working, ought to be more complex to manage.

However, with VisionTime, a crucial aspect of the system design is that the software programmes, will cater amply for handling such eventualities. For example, VisionTime automatically recognises - differing flexi carryovers, diverse flexi periods & any “shape” of day; where the empoyee is working from/at and so on.