The Benefits of Provisioning Your Time & Attendance Systems

The time inevitably comes when your customers will need new employee time clocks. In most cases, they’re expanding and need more terminals for a new location or to accommodate a larger workforce.  Sometimes, an existing time clock needs to be replaced. In either case, your customer is going to contact you for the new clock – if you’ve made the smart move to add value to your business model by offering employee time clocks, that is.

The provisioning requirements for a new time clock are fixed:

• The operating system and any necessary software needs to get installed on the time clock
•  The software needs to be configured to the customer’s specifications

Whether the employee time clock hardware only needs an operating system, or data collection software and/or communication software, it has to be ready to plug into the wall right out of the box once it gets to your customer. The best opportunity to improve and speed up the provisioning process is to have the time clocks provisioned at the factory, rather than at your facilities.

Provisioning time clocks isn’t your job

A key benefit of being an ATS terminal reseller is that we retain the responsibility for managing and delivering the time clocks to your customer. We don’t pass that burden on to our reseller partners. Let’s say you need to fulfill your customers orders by month's end and you need to deliver 50 new time clocks. No VAR wants to find space to store them, let alone the personnel and effort hours to turn each one on, install all the necessary software, configure the software, and then test each terminal. When you have ATS provision your customers’ time and attendance systems for you, ATS handles all that work.

Factory provisioning offers better customer service to your customers

Factory provisioning isn’t just a significant benefit for our VAR partners. It also benefits the end customer. We can cut the entire process in half when doing the provisioning.

When a customer places an order for new time clocks, the VAR can either have the terminals delivered to them to do the work or have ATS do the installations and ship the clocks directly to the end customer. The first option can take anywhere from five to six weeks, perhaps longer depending on the resources and schedule of the VAR to get the software installations done. When ATS does the installations, we have the resources and expertise to get it done quickly.

By removing the extra step of shipping to the VAR before they can get shipped to the customer, we are able to cut down on shipping costs. Having only one delivery leg also minimizes the points where something can go wrong with the time clocks during shipment.

In most cases, we can get the time clocks configured and delivered in a shorter window, which is nearly half the time as the traditional provisioning process.

Factory provisioning isn’t a difficult decision

Factory provisioning takes all the fulfillment responsibilities off the VAR’s plate, even as the order and revenue for the time clock order come into the VAR. On top of that, factory provisioning speeds up the delivery time to the end customer and keeps shipping costs down. When you decide to brand the ATS time clocks, ATS's role in the entire provisioning process is transparent to your customer. All the customer service goodwill that comes from delivering plug & play time clocks to your customers on a quick schedule comes to the VAR.

Every business decision should be this clear-cut.

"While ATS is passionate about time and attendance and excited to support organizations navigate workforce dynamics around timekeeping, we recommend you reach out to your country, regional and/or local HR chapter for more information on common workplace advice and procedures."