Walman Optical

Keeping an Eye on Employee Time with Biometric Software

Walman Optical was founded in 1915 in Minneapolis, Minnesota by J.A.L. Walman. Since its humble beginnings, the company has evolved into the nation's largest independent ophthalmic company with annual sales exceeding $100 million. Today, the value-added wholesaler continues its tradition, serving ophthalmologists, optometrists and opticians with prescription fabrication, frame selection and stock, and optical instruments. While the company's headquarters remain in Minnesota , its reach expands nationwide with more than 38 branch offices, including 32 labs, in 20 states.

The company's ability to achieve high levels of both customer and employee loyalty translate into a success story that is, due in part, to its long-standing commitment for achieving technical excellence and innovative solutions.

On the information technology front, Walman continually develops and/or adapts internal systems of electronic knowledge sharing to improve external convenience and to maximize internal efficiencies.

"Technology improves quality, reduces cost, and increases overall operational efficiencies," which, says IS Manager of Operations Lorinda Fraboni, is one of the reasons a state-of-the-art application integrated with biometrics was selected to manage the time and attendance of the company's 800 employees. Before automated time-tracking entered the marketplace, Walman Optical, like many businesses, relied on an electronic timeclock to capture employee hours.

"There were so many inefficiencies – both in terms of time, productivity and data, with the conventional punch-clock method," contends Fraboni. "We were anxious to convert to a more efficient and effective system." But, the criteria, to find an affordable system capable of meeting the needs of an 800-employee, 38-plus-location operation, was, according to Fraboni, no small task.

"Our primary objectives for a new time-tracking system were reductions in the excessive amounts of time and labor we'd been investing on timecard data entry tasks," Fraboni says. "Also important to us was finding a system with the ability to eliminate human errors and prevent buddy-punching," a common form of time-theft that involves employees punching-in for co-workers running late, and in some cases, failing altogether to come to work.

To eliminate buddy-punching, Fraboni turned to applications incorporated with a biometrics – which rely on unique human characteristics to identify and authenticate user identities.

"We initially considered a system that utilized iris scanning, but it was well outside of our budget limitations," Fraboni says. "As we conducted further research, we were increasingly impressed with fingerprint technologies, and especially liked what we learned about Digital Persona. When our systems analyst discovered their technology had been adapted by an award-winning developer of time and attendance systems, Count Me In, LLC, we believed we'd found our solution."

In 2002, Walman Optical implemented Count Me In's Timecard Monitor to manage and monitor time and attendance for 650 employees working at 30 locations. Beyond capturing employee hours, Timecard Monitor is also designed to provide seamless integration with QuickBooks Pro 2002 and beyond, and other leading payroll and accounting packages. But, unlike the majority of businesses using these popular financial management programs, Walman had its own customized applications. To meet the organization's specific needs, each facility was equipped with its own fingerprint sensor for capturing employee arrival and departure times and its own copy of the software, retaining the database on the individual standalone systems. Walman's customized program then imported each location's data into the centralized database, enabling integration with the company's payroll program.

As the company's expansion continued, satisfaction with Timecard Monitor has kept equal pace. Applications have been installed at each new lab acquired by the organization. Today, the system is responsible for providing the accurate accounting of hours for Walman's 800 employees working at its continually multiplying locations.

"We conducted an internal cost-study ROI analysis early-on that revealed impressive findings," says Fraboni. "We saved a minimum of one hour each week at each location and more than four hours weekly of corporate time. For an operation the size of ours, that's a savings of more than 50 hours a week in companywide time and productivity alone, explains Fraboni who adds that the company also saw a nationwide reduction in incidents of time-theft associated with buddy-punching.

"Within two months of system implementation, Timecard Monitor had more than paid for itself," reports Fraboni. "The technology is very affordable and very accurate and has more than met our expectations and demands. We highly recommend it to any organization seeking a cost-effective method for managing employee time and attendance."