LE FOREM

Case Study

Forem : Unitime is biding its time...

An encounter with Mr Lachapelle, head of HR Information at Forem, the Belgian unemployment training office. His department is in charge of providing all employees with the information they need about their rights and responsibilities. One of the department's missions is to make sure working hours are respected.

Forem is a well-known name in the Belgian economic landscape : devoted solely to training people looking for work in the Wallonia region, this public body employs nearly 3,000 staff in a score of training centres of various sizes throughout Wallonia.

The history of Forem's adoption of the Unitime system from IDtech is a little convoluted, as Mr Lachapelle admits : “We first installed Unitime in 1998, because our previous system was letting us down badly. A new system was being developed by a major multinational IT company, and we decided to use Unitime to keep us going until it was ready. We were surprised to find that once the new software was ready, Unitime was still useful, particularly in exporting its time-clock data to the new system. In newly-created Forem sites, Unitime was installed right from the beginning. Finally, over 6 years, the main system died a death for a number of reasons to do with Forem and the IT company. Although the company had a very good reputation for IT work, I think we would have been better off going to a specialist time management company, such as IDtech, from the beginning. So in the end, we decided in June 2004 to move all our attendance management and access control over to Unitime, Unipass and Uniguard, starting with existing sites. Eleven other sites will be added very soon.”

- So after working with IDtech for a long time, your time management and access control systems are still evolving, with a significant deployment of Unitime and Uniguard systems currently taking place ?

“Yes : our current policy is to systematically install IDtech badge readers as soon as we create a new site or move a site. Given my position, all the information I need is centralised and can be accessed from my department here in Charleroi, but the managers at each site can access the data about their own staff : Houdeng, Nivelles, Namur, Charleroi, Verviers, Arlon, Libramont, Grâce-Hollogne, Liège and Ecluse already have the system installed, and by next year a dozen more sites will be equipped. The system is currently used by over a thousand people, but in the end just about all our staff, three thousand employees, will be managed by Unitime.”

- Can such a large number of staff be managed with Unitime ?

“Yes, although extending and generalising Unitime to all our sites and all our staff will mean adapting the central server. We are waiting with interest for the results of the working group set up between Forem and IDtech to look into this adaptation. In fact, we are planning to use the Uniweb Time version, which will give access to the time management data over the intranet, so that staff can consult the information held about them. For these users, the features made available by the intranet will make the system very easy and convenient to use.”

- Did you have to ask IDtech for specific adaptations ?

“Given our type of activity and our staff, that wasn't necessary. The standard version of Unitime can handle our normal working hours and overtime, and our different types of fixed or flexible schedules. For external company visits, to trade fairs etc., we have created mission codes, with our own calculation methods, which were implemented in the system by IDtech's IT staff. At the moment, trainees working at Forem are not managed by Unitime. Some of them have temporary badges giving access to the premises. But it would be perfectly possible to have Unitime manage their hours as well.”

- What is the connection between clocking in and out and access control ?

Unitime

“There are different badge readers for the two functions. The time-clocks have a keyboard and a display as well as the access readers. But since I can see all the badge readers, I can use a person's entrance through an access reader to correct their time data if, for example, they forgot to clock in when they started work. This is a manual operation, carried out in the event of an anomaly. This kind of monitoring is done every day by the department in charge, so that old anomalies do not mount up ; because later on it gets very difficult to remember all the little details that happened on such and such a day if you don't notice the problem until the end of the month... Just for this building alone, there are several time-clocks and about fifty access control readers, with selective access etc.”

- How did the transition between your different successive systems work ?

“When we changed to Unitime on 1 June, all the data from the old system was reimported into Unitime. This wasn't easy, but IDtech took care of it successfully. When we changed over, a few days training for the HR staff were all that was needed. I have always congratulated myself on working with IDtech : they always try to provide solutions to our requests, and the service is perfect. They automatically implement updates. Between the version installed in 1998 and the one I have rediscovered recently (as we were just using Unitime as a letter-box for data for four years), there's a whole world of difference and evolution.”

- In practice, has Unitime made your work easier ?

“At the moment, temporarily... no ! But that's nothing to do with Unitime, it's the story I was telling you about earlier : because we abandoned the old system created by the multinational IT company, we had to return for a short while to a number of procedures that had disappeared. Annual leave requests and mission expenses management, for example. Fortunately, we will soon be using Uniweb Time, which will quickly take over all these functions. From their computers, employees will again be able to send annual leave requests to their line managers, which will be sent to us when they've been approved, etc. Another advantage the users are very keen on is the option of viewing their time-clock data on their PCs, together with their days worked, holidays etc.”