RFID Attendance Monitoring System

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CHAPTER I The Problem and Its Setting 1.1 INTRODUCTION Robert Bosch once said, “I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money, I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.” There are lots of reason for the employer to end up in legal trouble but the most common is the failure to pay the workers what they owed. In order to avoid that, business owners need to make sure they are keeping careful track of the employee’s attendance. According to Oloyede, Adedoyin and Adewole (2013), many industries are experiencing technological advancement and changes in the mode in which they carry out their business processes. With the rise of globalization, it is becoming essential to find an easier and more effective system to help an organization or company improve their employee’s productivity. In spite of this matter, there are some business establishments who still uses the old- fashioned method of manual process of recording employee’s attendance. Staff attendance management system is an easy way to keep track of the attendance of the staffs within an organization. It covers the requirements of the personnel department in terms of day to day monitoring of staffs, calculation of overtime and transfer of relevant information to the payroll system and manpower analysis. Hence, the staff attendance is an important issue every organization must take into consideration in order to be productive (Kadry and Smaili, 2010). In addition, according to Mycroft (2011), a report stated that staff productivity is greatly affected by the attendance of the staff (as cited in Computer Engineering and Intelligent Systems, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2014).

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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1.2 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY 1.2.1 Controlgear Electric Corporation Controlgear Electric Corporation is a manufacturing, engineering and construction company in the field of electrical system integration of high voltage substation to low voltage distribution and process. Their projects and experience expands nationwide, from companies involved in power generation and distribution to industrial manufacturing and commercial establishments. The management and staff have been involved in the field of Electrical Engineering both in the manufacturing and fabrication, design, construction, servicing, sales and marketing for more than two decades. Their success, according to them, comes because they continuously deliver goods. They anticipate and meet the customers’ requirements. They have a unique atmosphere. Vision, mission, corporate values and quality objectives of the company are understood and supported by all of the employees. Above all, CEC have the focus and strength of character to achieve results. They create a culture dedicated to achieving success, the success culture, and they recognized that there is always a room for improvement.

1.2.2 Payroll System Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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Payroll system is define as the administration of the financial record of employees' salaries, wages, bonuses, net pay, and deductions. An employer, regardless of the number of workers they employ, must maintain all records pertaining to payroll taxes (income tax withholding, Social Security and federal unemployment tax) for at least four years after the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later. Altogether, 20 different kinds of employment records must be kept just to satisfy federal requirements. ( http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/payrollmanagement) Payroll System is the heart of any Human Resources System of an Organization. The solution has to take care of calculation of salary as per rules of the Company. This Payroll System is a full-featured system that manages financial information of every employee in an organization. It computes and processes the payroll in a certain payroll period. This Payroll System is also a flexible compensation administration solution. It is designed to help human resource professionals as well as finance and accounting personnel to manage employee compensation, deductions, allowances, and benefits in an organization. The system is integrated with the Employee’s information, offers efficient features and functionalities to manage company's expenses. An employer uses a payroll system to process its payroll. Consequently, payroll cannot be processed without a payroll system. A payroll system allows the employer to pay employees on time and accurately, plus comply with other statutory regulations. According to Scott Koller, “Once the system was in place, we were able to cut the time to process payroll to one – fourth the time it took originally”. CEC have their own payroll system. However, the existing

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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payroll system still need manual input of the employees’ attendance which makes the process time consuming. 1.2.3 Attendance Monitoring System An attendance management system is the organized way of managing daily time records or presence in a job setting to reduce losses due to employee’s downtime. The attendance system has traditionally been approached using time clocks and timesheets, but today, attendance management goes beyond this to provide a work environment which motivates and maximizes employee attendance. Attendance management is a major part of today’s human resource systems; take organization towards better human resource practice, systems and excellence, hence regular attendance and punctuality are expected of all employees or candidates in a work setting. Unsatisfactory attendance caused by unscheduled absences and tardiness that cause a disruption in work, affects productivity, and creates morale problems when workloads are shifted to other employees. (C.O, A., A.O, A. , O.O, O. , & E.O, I. ,2013) 1.2.4. Types of Attendance Management System Attendance Management falls into two categories namely; Conventional and Automated methods. Conventional methods is the traditional approached on getting the attendance. It includes time sheets, attendance register and time clock. Automated methods is includes the application of emerging technologies used in identification such as Barcodes, Magnetic Stripes, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Biometrics. The barcode attendance system requires that every employee is issued a badge/card in which there is a barcode. In order to check into or out of the company, the badge/card is swapped on the time clock, and the data is captured by the clock. In the

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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magnetic stripe attendance system, data is encoded in the magnetic stripe of the employee card. When the card, is swiped through the employee time clock, the information in the card’s magnetic stripe is recorded by the time clock. This system reads one card at a time and also requires contact with the reader. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that uses radio waves to transfer data from an electronic tag, called RFID tag or label, attached to an object, through a reader for the purpose of identifying and tracking the object. The ID cards of the employees is embedded with RFID tag which is read by a reader. This RFID system is interfaced to a database through a computer. Each employee uses an RFID card and the reader records the data when the employee enters or exits. In biometric Attendance system, there is attendance software that is paired with a time clock for employees which uses biometric technology for authentication purposes. When these systems are in use, the employees can use their biometric data such as finger prints for clocking in and clocking out. This method has the great benefit that the entire process is easy as well as quick. Other advantages include elimination of the cost previously incurred in getting the employees cards. (C.O, A., A.O, A., O.O, O., & E.O, I., 2013) 1.2.5 Comparison between RFID and Fingerprint Scanner The main difference between a biometric attendance system and an RFID based attendance system is that the RFID based attendance system uses tags, which can be exchanged between employees, while a biometric attendance system uses organic matter that cannot be exchanged. This makes stealing time from a place of work much more difficult because it removes the chances that buddy punching will work. Normal systems use employee identification numbers or punch cards to record when an employee Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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enters or leaves an area, RFID based attendance systems use tags which can be exchanged among employees, but fingerprints or retinas are not able to be shared. Another difference is that the biometric attendance system requires the employee to actively scan his or her fingerprint in order for the system to register that he or she is there. With an RFID based attendance system, the tags will be scanned immediately when the person enters an area. Common applications that are well suited for RFID system implementations includes Inventory Management, Product life cycle management, Electronic toll collection, Automatic vehicle identification, Car parking and access control, etc. Common RFID vulnerabilities include RFID data skimming, tag killing, and susceptibility to a DoS attack. These vulnerabilities are described below: RFID Card Skimming One of the biggest vulnerabilities of RFID systems is the fact that anyone with access to a suitable reader can capture the information stored on the ID. This act of surreptitiously grabbing personal information from a victim’s financial transaction card or any RFID enabled ID is known as “electronic pick-pocketing. Tag Killing RFID systems that support read/write memory are susceptible to unauthorized tag killings from large distances using specially configured readers. This allows the attacker to alter the tag memory content without the owner’s knowledge. Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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1.3 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM This study will focus on how to develop a system capable of monitoring the employees’ attendance with the use of fingerprint scanner and integrate it to a Payroll System. Specifically, this study will cover the following: 

How effective fingerprint scanner is compare to other devices when it

 

comes to attendance monitoring? How to create a Payroll System using Visual Basic Programming? How to integrate the Attendance Management System into the Payroll System?

1.4 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY The primary objective of this study is to develop a system which is capable of monitoring the employees’ attendance and use it for the computation of their salaries. Specifically, the proposed study aimed to: 

To create an attendance monitoring system with the application of a



technology which is more secure and reliable. To create a Payroll System which organizes all the employees’ payments



including deductions like loans and tax. To test the functionality of Fingerprint Biometrics in terms of attendance

 

monitoring. To integrate the attendance monitoring system with the payroll system. To design an appropriate interface to integrate with an existing application.

1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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This study is significant to the following: 

The End User The end user of the payroll system will be on the HR department of the company since it is their task to compute for the employees’ payroll. It will be significant for them because it will lessen the time they spend generating the payroll reports and computation. It will also give them accurate data which lessens probability of repeating their work.



To the Controlgear Electric Corporation

This system will provide an integrated, secure record of all employees’ data of payments, while reducing human capital management. 

The Future Researchers The study will serve as a reference for those who wanted to develop and improve the existing system. It can be a guide for those who wants to conduct a study with the same topic.

1.6 SCOPE AND DELIMITATIONS

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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The scopes of this study are: 

The study will focused on the design and development of the attendance



monitoring system with the use of Fingerprint scanner. This system is developed for the attendance monitoring and payroll system of

 

the employees of Controlgear Electric Corporation. The system will be developed using Visual Basic Programming. The system will be capable of producing pay slip for the employees through



fingerprint scanning. Deductions on salaries will also be one of the functions of the system. Examples are loan deductions, late and absences, etc.

However, the proponents delimits the study into the following: 

The administrator is the only one capable of updating and accessing the

 

system’s database. Computation of tax will not be part of the system’s function. Releasing of salaries.

CHAPTER II Conceptual Framework

2.1 RELATED CONCEPTS/ LITERATURE Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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2.1.1 Foreign Literature Biometrics is the emerging technology used for identification. Attendance in educational institutions, industries will require more paper work and time. To reduce this, automatic attendance system using finger print was developed. We also call it as Biometric Attendance System. Biometrics is defined as the unique (personal) physical/logical characteristics or traits of human body [Jain, 2004]. These characteristics and traits are used to identify each human. Any details of the human body which differs from one human to other will be used as unique biometric data to serve as that person's unique identification (ID), such as: retinal, iris, fingerprint, palm print and DNA. Biometric systems will collect and store this data in order to use it for verifying personal identity. The combination of biometric data systems and biometrics recognition/ identification technologies creates the biometric security systems. The biometric security system is a lock and capture mechanism to control access to specific data. In order to access the biometric security system, an individual will need to provide their unique characteristics or traits which will be matched to a database in the system. If there is a match, the locking system will provide access to the data for the user. The locking and capturing system will activate and record information of users who accessed the data. The relationship between the biometric and biometric security system is also known as the lock and key system. The biometrics security system is the lock and biometrics is the key to open that lock [Jain, 2006]. There are seven basic criteria for biometric security system: uniqueness, universality, permanence, collectability, performance, acceptability and circumvention [Schuckers, 2001]. As mentioned above, uniqueness is considered as the priority one requirement for biometric data. It will indicate how differently and Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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uniquely the biometric system will be able to recognize each user among groups of users. For instance, the DNA of each person is unique and it is impossible to replicate. Universality is the secondary criteria for the biometric security. This parameter indicates requirements for unique characteristics of each person in the world, which cannot be replicated. For example, retinal and iris are characteristics will satisfy this requirement. Thirdly, a permanence parameter is required for every single characteristic or trait which is recorded in the database of the system and needs to be constant for a certain period of time period. This parameter will mostly be affected by the age of the user. Following the permanence parameter is the collectability. The collectability parameter requires the collection of each characteristic and trait by the system in order to verify their identification. Then, performance is the next parameter for the system which outlines how well the security system works. The accuracy and robustness are main factors for the biometric security system. These factors will decide the performance of the biometric security system. The acceptability parameter will choose fields in which biometric technologies are acceptable. Finally, circumvention will decide how easily each characteristic and trait provided by the user can lead to failure during the verification process. DNA is believed to be the most difficult characteristic leading to the failure of the verification process [Maestre, 2009].

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Figure 2.1.1 - Basic Criteria for Biometrics Security System [Rahultech, 2010] Application Fields for Biometrics Technology Physical access control refers to the process that requires the physical characteristics. On the other hand, logical access control is the schemes, procedures and techniques which are used in the system. The difference between logical and physical access control is really small and it can be confused easily because physical access control is controlled by logical access control. 2.1-Physical access control Physical access control covers identity authentication processes which require users

to provide physical characteristics. It is used in high security locations such

as: hospitals, police stations, and the military. The most common use for the physical access control application is the access devices which are applied at doors or computers. This application is confidential and important and is entrusted with a high level of security. The physical access control reduces the risk of human problems. It also covers the aspect of data loss in the system. The system helps to eliminate the process of identifying long and complex passcodes with different processes. Physical access control is not only effective and efficient but also safe, secure and profitable in the workplace[O'Neill, 2011].

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2.2-Logical access control Logical access control refers to a process of a scheme control over data files or computer programs. These contain personal or privacy information of many different users. Logical access control is used by militaries and governments to protect their important data with high security systems using biometric technology. The only difference between logical access control and physical access control is that the logical access control is used for computer networks and system access control. It helps to reduce the burden of long and complex password requirements for users. Moreover, it is more secure and effective in the way of protecting and maintaining privacy over data in the system. Furthermore, it also provides a great advantage by saving time and money [O'Neill, 2011]. Fingerprint Reader Our fingerprint is made of a number of ridges and valley on the surface of finger that are unique to each human. "Ridges are the upper skin layer segments of the finger and valleys are the lower segments" [Biometricsnewportal 2011]. The ridges form two minutiae points: ridge endings-where the ridges end, and ridge bifurcationswhere the ridges split in two. The uniqueness of a fingerprint can be determined by the different patterns of ridges and furrows as well as the minutiae points. There are five basic patterns which make up the fingerprint: the arch such as tented and plain arch covers 5% of fingerprint; left and right loop covers 60% of fingerprints; whorl covers 34% of fingerprints and accidental whorls covers 1% of fingerprints [Health Department of New Mexico].

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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To capture the surface of the fingerprint for verification during the identification of users, new technologies are designed with tools such as: optical and ultrasound. There are two main algorithms which are used to recognize fingerprints: minutiae matching and pattern matching. 

Minutiae matching will compare the details of the extract minutiae to identify the difference between one users fingerprint as compared to others. When users register with the system, they will record images of minutiae location and direction on finger surface. When users use fingerprint recognition system to verify their identification, a minutiae image is brought out and compared with the one which provided at the time of access.[Biometricsnewportal 2011].



Pattern matching will compare all the surfaces of the finger instead of one particular point. It will concentrate more in thickness, curvature and density of finger's surface. The image of the fingers surface for this method will contain the area around a minutiae point, areas with low curvature radius or areas with unusual combinations of ridges [Biometricsnewportal 2011].

There are several benefits of using fingerprint recognition systems. This system is easy to use and install. It requires cheap equipment which generally has low power consumption. However, there are some disadvantages in this system. If the surface of the finger gets damaged and/or has one or more marks on it, identification becomes increasingly hard. Furthermore, the system requires the users' finger surface to have a point of minutiae or pattern in order to have matching images. This will be a

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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limitation factor for the security of the algorithm. Fingerprint security system is used widely in different applications such as: cell phones, laptops, USB flash drives and others devices. It is also used in judicial systems in order to record users' information and verify one person's identity [Biometrics new portal 2011].

Figure 2.1.2 - Fingerprint types [Lazaroff, 2004].

2.1.2 Local Literature

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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2.1 RELATED STUDIES/ SYSTEM 2.1.1 Foreign Studies/ System Institutions, companies and organizations where security and net productivity is vital, access to certain areas must be controlled and monitored through an automated system of attendance. Managing people is a difficult task for most of the organizations and maintaining the attendance record is an important factor in people management. When considering the academic institute, taking the attendance of nonacademic staff on daily basis and maintaining the records is a major task. Manually taking attendance and maintaining it for a long time adds to the difficulty of this task as well as wastes a lot of time. For this reason, an efficient system is proposed to solve the problem of manual attendance. It is entitled “Development of Fingerprint Biometric Attendance System for Non-Academic Staff in a Tertiary Institution” on Department of Computer Science, University of Ilorin, Ilorin, P.M.B. 1515, Ilorin, Nigeria. This system takes attendance electronically with the help of a fingerprint recognition system, and all the records are saved for subsequent operations. Staff biometric attendance system employs an automated system to calculate attendance of staff in an organization and do further calculations of monthly attendance summary in order to reduce human errors during calculations. In essence, the proposed system can be employed in curbing the problems of lateness, buddy punching and truancy in any institution, organization or establishment. The proposed system will also improve the productivity of any organization if properly implemented. This system is developed using Object Oriented Design (OOD) techniques, it will be useful to identify the overall requirements in functional terms, mainly because, as pointed out by Rickman (2005), one of the weaknesses of OOD is that OOD methods only build functional models within the objects.

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2.1.2 Local Studies/ System Payroll System with Daily Time Record Using Bio-Metric Authentication The aim of this project is to identify and solve the problems concerning the Payroll and Daily Time Record System of DBA enterprise – a fast growing company which caters direct selling of AVON products throughout Mindanao. The company experiences some concerns on monitoring the attendances of their employees and the computation of the payroll of each employee. The traditional payroll and daily time record system could no longer cope with the number of branches they have all over Mindanao. Through the analysis made by the proponents, it has been found that Payroll System with Daily Time Record using Biometric Authentication may solve the current problems of the company. The study covered the cost of the proposed system, its operational functions, its benefits and its impact towards the company. The project was completed within the time span of three semesters (Academic Years 2008-2009 to 2009-2010). After the testing and evaluation, it was concluded that the automated Payroll System with Daily Time Record is really beneficial to the company. The system facilitates the generation of payroll and monitoring of attendances in a cheaper, easier and faster way. It could reduce failure of reporting and analysis, and could provide timely and accurate reliability/quality reports.

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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APPENDIX A

Relevant Source Code

Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation

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Payroll System with Fingerprint Based Attendance Monitoring for Controlgear Electric Corporation