Case Study
THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM 
SYSTEM: VISIONTIMEWEB
NO. OF EMPLOYEES:       200
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THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM approached MultiTime 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 : 

MultiTime Systems 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.   

  
VisionTimeWeb was designed by MultiTime 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 PCs.  All updates to time and absence records are now submitted electronically by staff and then “signed off” electronically by supervisors.  

 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 VisionTimeWeb saves considerable time for central administrators when compared with the earlier technology. With the aid of the trend analysis output in VisionTimeWeb, 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.

From now on staff, in general, will want to exercise these new and agreed time options, such as job share, work share, term time, tele-working, etc. 

Therefore, such a diversity of options ought to be more complex to manage.    

However, with VisionTimeWeb, a crucial aspect of the system design is that the software programmes, allied to increasing “input” functionality for staff, will cater automatically for such eventualities.  For example, VTWeb automatically recognises - differing flexi carryovers, diverse flexi periods & any “shape” of day - and even combinations of these, and for each person, if necessary.