Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Reason Why We Should Focus Beyond Biometrics

A number of people tend to get the impression that our company specializes in fingerprint products and technologies only. Although this perception is not exactly accurate, it is observed that the term ‘biometrics’ looks catchier at first glance and this works in our favour as it becomes the conversational piece for the general audience, making it a useful ice-breaker for market penetration.

I agree that without fingerprint technology, it's rather hard for us to penetrate into certain industries. Ideally, we should declare ourselves a solution provider, or an expert in time and attendance, and access control industries. And, biometrics should just be a credential, or a threshold that presents itself as a more sophisticated solution.

Fingerprint: ice-breaker for market penetration
My advice to customers, don’t place biometrics as their sole consideration when sourcing for time and attendance or access control solution. Biometrics technology is indeed an important aspect to consider but the right solution is even more crucial when buying the solutions. Instead of only considering the performance of the biometrics readers, they should spend more time studying details of the software to match the actual requirements. It is imperative for customers to list the requirements down and test the software inside out, determine whether it could integrate with the existing payroll system and how it works as your access control system in totality.

Often times a lot of customers allow themselves to be distracted by the fingerprint technology performance when in reality what they ACTUALLY require is time and attendance system. It has becoming a common belief that when vendors parade their fantastic fingerprint readers, the software that comes along is equally fantastic to handle their T&A requirements. We always receive many questions about biometrics rather than the software before clients conclude the purchase. This, in my opinion, is very wrong. When this happen, clients might be happy with the front end clocking system, but if they are not careful in selecting the software, they might take a lot of time and effort to handle the backend processing. The system might fail to handle the payroll system and at the end of the day, the promise of office automation never takes place.

Cloud solution for time & attendance 
After technology and market breakthrough in biometrics, FingerTec has been pouring much of our resources in R&D to complete the time and attendance and access control solutions. We believe that to compete with the real industry players, we have to deliver the real solutions and even so, we must deliver it better even though we came it later. We strongly believe that the advantages of biometrics credential are transient; the bona fide solution will last forever.

Just like how biometric readers replaced some RFID solutions to becoming the new trend in the past decade, biometrics itself might look less appealing when smart phone has the fashionable tendency as a new clocking credential.

That's why we set forth "Beyond biometrics” as our motto, urging customers to go beyond biometrics, because only then they’ll see the full picture and obtain the total solution they have hoped for.