The importance of redundancy for time and attendance to provide business continuity for payroll amidst cybersecurity attacks

According to a recent poll, 7 out of 10 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Many are hourly workers whose jobs range from medical assistants to aircraft mechanics, retail sales associates, and even police officers. Already under financial strain, what happens when these invaluable workers are not paid on time? Unfortunately, this nightmare became a reality for millions of hourly workers when a time and attendance provider had an outage that lasted months leaving their customers across the globe without an automated way to capture time worked and pay their hourly workers accurately and on time.

The impacted employers turned to various manual solutions to cope with the temporary loss of their workforce management system. Some asked employees to submit Google Forms every two weeks, while others asked employees to send in their hours by email. Others chose to estimate their workers' hours, whether by calculating pay based on an employee's scheduled hours or duplicating paychecks from previous pay periods. Regardless of the approach taken, this administrative chaos resulted in pay shortages for some employees, especially those who worked overtime or on holidays. However, those organizations who had a redundancy system in place were able to ensure business continuity and minimize the disruption until their primary system was restored.

What is technology redundancy and why is it important?

Redundancy is a common practice among IT when it comes to critical business applications. It is an engineering term that addresses “the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the form of a backup or fail-safe, or to improve actual system performance.” Basically, it means in the event of a disturbance to your IT operations, mission critical business processes can continue as normal.  Time and attendance can be overlooked as a critical business process. However, for many hourly workers who live paycheck to paycheck, not getting paid on time can impact their livelihood. Hourly workers are usually paid on weekly pay cycles and must report their hours worked to get paid. If payroll doesn’t receive a time card for these workers, it’s assumed they didn’t work and therefore won’t get paid. It is essential to always have a way to capture these workers’ time, and even more so when the business operations are 24/7.

Sleep well with a simple time card solution

Oracle Time and Labor created an affordable turnkey simple time card solution that Oracle HCM customers leveraged during a recent third party time and attendance outage event. All Oracle HCM Customers with hourly employees can now license Oracle Cloud Time and Labor at a discounted price for the simple time card redundancy solution to accurately capture employee and contingent workers’ time and send to payroll if your third-party primary time and attendance system experiences an outage. This solution is easy to configure in a matter of hours and is part of the Oracle Cloud HCM product suite enabling access to up-to-date HR data for your workers. Having a redundancy solution in place can minimize the impact of an outage on your hourly workers’ lives and lessen the burden by reducing pay errors and adjustments with accurate time capture, while an organization’s primary time and attendance system is unavailable. Once the primary time and attendance system are restored, the simple time card will facilitate faster reconciliation.

Deliver fast and simple back up time entry

Want to learn more about how to keep your time and attendance operations secure and reliable? Learn how Oracle Cloud Time and Labor can deliver fast and simple back up time entry.

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