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Industrial biometrics incorporates health, safety compliance

Know where your workers are and be OHS compliant using a simple fingerprint.


Johannesburg, 12 Sep 2017
Nicolas Garcia, OT-Morpho, regional director of sales for sub-Saharan Africa.
Nicolas Garcia, OT-Morpho, regional director of sales for sub-Saharan Africa.

In sectors such as the mining or automotive manufacturing industry, there are two main factors to consider when it comes to access control. One is knowing which workers are where on your premises - so in the event of an emergency, for example, you know who you need to look for. The other is health and safety compliance (OHS).

Nicolas Garcia, OT-Morpho, regional director of sales for Sub-Saharan Africa, says: "Traditionally, access control, which goes hand-in-hand with time and attendance registry, as well as controlling who has access to sensitive or dangerous sites, has always been a focus. However health and safety compliance is coming increasingly under the spotlight."

Individual identity cards have always been used for this purpose, and these have become increasingly smarter over time, including elements such as contactless technology, barcodes and even incorporating the use of a PIN code. However, the big drawback to giving your employees a physical card, says Garcia, is that it can be lost, forgotten or even stolen. "For this reason, the use of biometrics has become increasingly popular over the past decade or so," he says. "Historically, biometric access control has relied on the use of fingerprints. However the technology has evolved significantly to include things like facial recognition and iris scanning."

In or Out?

"Biometric access control is having a massive impact from a time and attendance perspective because it enables organisations to eliminate practices like ghost employees and buddy clocking," says Garcia. A ghost employee is somebody who has been created on the organisation's system, but doesn't actually exist. A fake card is created for this person and is used to clock him or her in and out of work by the perpetrator, this 'employee' earns a salary and ends up costing the company money. The buddy system, explains Garcia, is when people allow colleagues to clock them in and out of work on days that they don't actually go into work. The loss to the business is obvious in both instances; however both of these practices are impossible at sites that use biometric access control.

"So if you consider the benefits to the company from a fraud-prevention perspective alone," says Garcia, "you can see that the cost of implementing a biometric system could be recouped fairly quickly, especially when you're looking at big industries that have thousands of workers spread across many sites. Biometrics has a high adoption rate in South Africa because of our huge manufacturing - particularly automotive - and mining industries and the sheer number of employees that they are accountable for."

He explains that the use of biometric access control is ideal for low-skilled workers, as they don't have to fill in any kind of log, they simply place their finger on the reader, it records their name, the date and time, and they enter the premises. This information is linked to a centralised system that enables the business to access reports when needed and the payroll automatically generates a payslip for that worker based on the number of hours worked.

OHS matters

For many years, access control and recording time and attendance were sufficient for most businesses, according to Garcia. "However, health and safety regulations are so strict today that employers need to know who is entering their premises and whether they're certified to be in the areas that they wish to access. With biometric access you can immediately establish whether that person's medical check-up (if one is required) is up to date, or whether they've been properly certified on the latest process, for example. The minute they put their fingerprint on the reader it links back to the system to check the individual's status against certain predefined criteria for the part of the business that they're trying to access."

An integrated biometric system is able to access all of the business rules that apply to the site and each employee on the system. If an employee is due to have a medical check-up, for example, the reader will alert him ahead of time that he or she needs to report for the check-up. If he or she fails to do so, he eventually won't be granted access. This type of control is invaluable at any site where stringent health and safety rules apply.

Another useful application of this type of system is for random drug and alcohol testing, says Garcia. So the system will identify random employees for testing as they access the premises. He says: "While this type of measure may seem extreme, if you consider that as an employer, you're responsible if there's an accident on site and you don't have any of these preventive measures in place."

Four things to consider when implementing biometric access control in an industrial environment:

* It must be able to withstand harsh environments and weather conditions.
* It has to be able to operate with poor quality fingerprints such as those of manual workers, young or elderly people. An alternative would be to move to other technology like iris or facial recognition.
* The system must cater for a large number of employees across large sites.
* Personal data must be secured for privacy and security reasons.

Garcia concludes by saying: "Some industrial sites use a combination of access cards, fingerprints and PIN codes, but when it comes to ensuring that people aren't in hazardous areas that they don't belong in, biometric access control is the only totally secure way of doing this."

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