Paragon Engineered Timber, a timber roof truss manufacturer for the house builder market, has moved into a manufacturing facility on a 5-year lease, costing them £35,000 a year.

 

Jason Thorne, director at Lambert Smith Hampton, the property consultancy who completed the lease deal for Paragon, said: "Situated next to the A465 Heads of the Valleys road five miles north of Neath, the park has become a popular business location as it provides occupiers with easy access to key transport routes including junction 43 of the M4.

 

"The park’s light industrial and warehouse units are now all occupied, with only some office accommodation still available."

 

The previous company to take up an industrial space is Recycle Direct, which provides Lindemann equipment, spares and servicing. In October they moved from their smaller premises in Bridgend into a 13,035 square foot unit for five years at £27,000 per year.

 

Nigel Davies, managing director of Recycle Direct, said: "We are a family-owned, independent business formed over 20 years ago by two former Lindemann service engineers to provide reliable and inexpensive spares and service. Recycle Direct is a full engineering service provider for the recycling industry.

 

"This new base not only provides us with room for growth but superb access routes to our customers all over the UK."

 

Source: Insider Media Wales

 

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Factories and production facilities have been using clocking machines to monitor and measure their employees’ hours for payroll since the 19th century. 

 

However, it is important that these industries don’t get stuck in the past! Some companies are still using very old-fashioned methods such as swipe cards or punch cards to record employee entrances and exits. These are very basic methods which don’t give any additional information, are difficult to collect in a digital form for payroll, and are exceedingly easy for employees to abuse. 

 

Depending on the company’s requirements, we can offer three alternatives to bring them up to date.

 

Firstly, if they would like to keep using cards to record their time and attendance in order to disrupt their workforce as little as possible, then we can offer the company our contactless proximity smartcards. 

 

Our smartcards are about the size of an average credit card, and fit in your wallet. The radio frequency technology means that you don’t even have to take them out of the wallet in order to scan them! This completely contactless technique means that the card doesn’t suffer from wear and tear and doesn’t need a battery. 

 

The second option is to install a fingerprint scanner. This is useful for factories which have had problems with people losing their cards, or with people deliberately swapping cards and clocking in for each other. 

 

Whenever registered users have their fingerprints scanned, a comparison is made between the live fingerprint and the stored fingerprint template and if the two match, the event is saved in the controller database.

 

These first two options can both be programmed onto the same reader; our time and attendance clocking station. The final option is a different piece of hardware, though it is seamlessly incorporated into our software: the hand geometry scanner. 

 

The hand geometry scanner is better than the fingerprint scanner in situations where workers might end up with very dirty fingers, like a construction site or a kitchen. 

 

The terminal captures an image of the hand each time the employee punches. The hand’s size and the shape are used to verify their identity accurately. No finger or palm prints are recorded. 

 

For more information on any of our 21st century time and attendance products, please get in touch!