Saint-Gobain Sekurit

Case Study

Saint-Gobain Sekurit Benelux (Auvelais):
Reliable productivity calculation thanks to Unitime

An encounter with Mr Laviolette, in charge of managing employee salaries in the HR department of Saint-Gobain/Sekurit.

Founded in 1989 on a glass-making site that had been active since 1928, the limited company Saint-Gobain/Sekurit Benelux is part of the Saint-Gobain group. This subsidiary specialises in manufacturing laminated windscreens and tempered glass side windows for vehicles. It employs 485 people (including production and administrative staff), producing 1.4 million windscreens and 2.5 million side windows a year. This results in a turnover of about 100 million euros.

Saint-Gobain/Sekurit's decision to install IDtech's Unitime system at its Auvelais site in Belgium was not the company's first experience with computerised time management, as Mr Laviolette explains:

"When I arrived at the company, there was already an automatic time-clock system, but it couldn't adapt to the changes our company needed, associated with the transition to the euro. So we contacted several companies, and IDtech was the one we chose. We created our whole system together."

- In terms of the layout of the premises, how is your manufacturing site organised?

"There are actually two separate factories which belong to the same group: Saint-Gobain Sekurit, our factory, which only makes laminated glass for vehicles, and Saint-Gobain Glass, which makes flat glass. The two companies are separate, but the buildings are next to each other at the Auvelais site. Both companies are equipped with IDtech time management and access control systems, but independently: we both handle our data separately. But given the links between the two companies, the advantage is that, since we know the systems well, we can work in synergy with our colleagues in the other company and cover for each other mutually when someone is away. There are also two shared points of entry to our installations: a pedestrian turnstile and a guarded barrier for vehicles entering the site. These access points are equipped with card-readers which just control the entrances. Time management takes place elsewhere, within the work sites, and the time-clocks are distributed at various points in the factory."

- Is there a connection between access control and time management?

Unitime

"Yes, in the centralised database. But time management and access control are two separate objectives, handled by different departments. Both have access to the data they need. With the extra option, for us in the HR department, to be able to consult the time-clock and access control data. This is very useful, because it sometimes happens that someone forgets to clock in when they arrive at the workshop, and we can then establish their presence together by checking the trace they left when coming through the access control reader. The database is completely integrated, though. For the office staff, the system is a bit different: on a single reader, they can both clock in and gain access by using different keys. This means they can go out during the day for jobs off-site, without the time they are away being subtracted from their hours worked. They can also consult a whole series of counters. And their badges still work in the access control readers.
These were features we specifically requested from IDtech, but which are in fact provided as standard in their product."

- Does this variable clocking in and out call for special training for users?

"No, it's fairly simple and very convenient."

- Have managers accepted the system, and do they see it as a good thing?

"Yes, because with Unitime all special cases come through to our department, where we can take care of anomalies case by case, by contacting the person directly. For example, we might have a clock-in with no corresponding clock-out, if the person forgets to clock out when leaving. Or a person might be abroad for one or two days. For the factory staff in the workshops, anomalies are dealt with by the team leaders. They all have PCs on which they can view the Unitime system, with the time-clock data for just their own teams. They don't have access to other departments. They can look at and correct the times for their own teams, as we do for the office staff. In the HR department we have systems administrator status, with access to all the data for about 485 members of the Saint-Gobain Sekurit staff."

- How has the installation of Unitime changed your work?

"Before, we had to enter the times and calculate the salaries of everyone in the company. Two or three people were employed full-time just for this one job. Now, each team leader can correct and confirm the time-clock data for their team and sort out anomalies; and I do this job for the people we manage directly (a few staff members who don't have team leaders). Then this data interfaces directly with the salary calculation software."

- Concretely, what advantages has Unitime brought?

"Let's take an example on the screen: this is a canteen worker who was absent. The anomaly is shown in red in the list of his hours worked. I know that he was taking unplanned compensatory leave. So I mark the absence as such, and the anomaly disappears. Thanks to the graphical planning system, leave can be entered even a long time in advance, and in this case, as the absence was justified, it doesn't appear as an "anomaly". On the other hand, if he had clocked in on that day when he was supposed to be taking leave, the system would also have indicated an anomaly. His unexpected presence could be explained because we might have called him in. Everything is based on a typical schedule for each person, with additional planned leave and other planned exceptions. The system records the time-clock data and checks that it is compatible with the schedule.

To take another example, here is someone who has worked eight and three-quarter hours, although he has an eight-hour schedule. The system generates eight hours' pay, and asks for confirmation for the extra forty-five minutes. The team leader can make a decision, and confirm whether the person worked a quarter of an hour, half an hour or three quarters of an hour of overtime. He has the option of not confirming any overtime if he knows the person just stayed to chat in the workshop after work."

- So there's very little scope for cheating. Do the staff concerned know how the system works in detail?

"Of course. They know that overtime hours will only be paid for if declared in advance. And they know that it makes no difference to the total hours paid whether they clock out before or after taking a shower."

- So this time control is distributed between several managers?

"Yes. I handle the hours worked for about fifteen people directly. The other employees are handled by their team leaders. One of them has about 200 staff to manage. He spends almost all his time on it. Because I should also say that each employee is associated with a workshop sector. But they might work six hours in their own sector and two in another, depending on what is needed. The team leader has to allocate all the hours to the right sector. So that activity in each sector and levels of productivity can be calculated correctly. So there are about a dozen people who are partial system administrators. Of course, I look over the whole thing again, about once a month, before running the salary calculations, and I can ask for explanations case by case for each anomaly or each manual entry made by a team leader, because I can see when a change has been made. This decentralised management by the team leaders and the breakdown into sectors were part of the specifications we requested from IDtech. The system is very flexible, and allows for adjustments to individual needs and easy access for manual corrections."

- What type of data do you have to supply to Unitime?

"We defined the staff schedules together with IDtech. We have about thirty different schedules, with maximum clock-in and clock-out times for each one: we have staff who work in 5 teams, 4 teams, with 2 breaks, 3 breaks, only working mornings, only working days, two 12-hour shifts at weekends, etc. We can also enter all the specific details of our company: an extra day's leave for people over 50, or with 25 years' seniority, one sick leave qualifying day a year etc. - all our internal conventions.

In use, all this management takes very little time. Near the end of the month, I check the first three weeks' work, and clear up any anomalies reported by the system. This means that on the last day of the month I only have the last few days of work to check. As soon as the month is finished, the Unitime system interfaces with the salary calculation system, so that employees can be paid without delay.

Out of 400 staff, we receive maybe 5 or 6 requests for salary corrections a month, which is very few, and even then they're often due to mistakes by team leaders. Compared with the previous system, the difference in our workload is enormous. The old system was complicated, and the team leaders handled the hours worked on paper. Now we can generate activity reports for the different production centres, statistics etc... we can ask whatever we want!"

- And how does it work if major changes need to be made?

"No problem: for example, we changed from a 6-day to week to a 5-day week. IDtech came and made the necessary changes, while leaving all the data from the previous schedule accessible.

When we were looking for a supplier, we had another proposal for a good competing product, but we couldn't have had the adaptations we needed for our company. We would have had to make do with the standard system. Of course, we have paid extra to IDtech for the consultancy work we asked for, and for them to program these adaptations. But at least we have a totally tailor-made product.

What's more, they regularly update our software, or offer us solutions that have been developed elsewhere for other customers and could be useful for us too."

- How long does it take for a system like yours to be operational?

"To start with, the systems administrators were given training first of all, and then the team leaders received training here, on-site, from IDtech.

The period of training, entering all our data etc., took six months, not continuously of course, because we started well in advance. We didn't have any problems changing over. That was very important for us, because in the local social context, a late salary payment means a stoppage of work, guaranteed..."