Custom Time Clock Application for the City of Davenport
Tracking Time and Saving Money
Client Profile
Sierra Bravo’s client, the city of Davenport, Iowa, is a bustling, vibrant community with a rich history closely related to one of the world’s mightiest rivers, the picturesque Mississippi. City workers throughout the river community needed the ability to clock in and out of work without having to do so at the same physical location.
The city saw the value of having a time clock application that could be deployed throughout Davenport — one that lives on a TCP/IP so that all clocks connect to a port connected to their server.
Objectives
The city of Davenport realized that the administrative time spent capturing time clock data entry from scattered and discombobulated systems was not time or money well spent.
The primary challenge of the city’s old time clock reporting system had been communicating through a TCP/IP port. Davenport’s IT department wanted to move from using a serial port to a network for easier portability.
The city’s old time tracking system worked on serial ports, with an old and slow modem method of data transfer. The city’s IT department wanted and needed a program that would live on their server in order to avoid running serial cables to connect users in various locations.
Solution
The City of Davenport looked for a more efficient way to track the time of its civic workforce. Sierra Bravo was able to provide a cost-effective solution in less than 20 hours of work.
The city of Davenport had to have a reliable time clock system to increase reliability and decrease administrative costs. The time clock application Sierra Bravo created was built from scratch and adapted from Bravo Connector (DB Server).
Sierra Bravo wrote the server component and modified the program that ran the time clock to keep the connection constantly alive between the server and time clock that tracked the hours of all public works projects and employees.
Results
“We went to a time clock application with easier portability, which makes additional clocks easier to configure and connect,” said Dan DeFauw, Senior Program Analyst at the City of Davenport, who said their investment has since paid for itself in administrative cost savings.”
Now, when city employees punch in for work, their plain text data is sent through the network, including date, time and personal identity — using data coded into an employee badge as it is scanned. All this employee and time-entry data drops into a file as the time clock application processes the transaction. The cost-effective application created by Sierra Bravo saves city workers time previously spent on tedious data entry.
Now, the city of Davenport can track the hours of public works staff anywhere with an internet connection. Now, IT doesn’t have to baby sit servers at remote locations.
Time clocks can now be set up in any location with internet connectivity, and all employee time-related data is transmitted to a central place.
“I’d definitely recommend Sierra Bravo to others,” said DeFauw. “They are easy to work with and talk to. They get the job done efficiently. Their rates are reasonable, and they just get the job done right.”