Tag Archives: TimeControl

timecontrol, timecontrol online

Is it getting harder to support an on-premise enterprise system?

TimeControl Online, Timesheeet Software as a Service Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisOnly a few years ago we wouldn’t have even had this conversation.  Even with Software as a Service becoming more popular over 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom at the time was that significant enterprise systems would always be housed in-house.

That conventional wisdom has changed.

Big IT vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon have pushed hard for organizations to shift to an online subscription model.  At one time the thinking was that this would be most attractive to small and medium sized businesses but that thinking has evolved too.

Here at HMS, we have had TimeControl on-premise available since 1994.  TimeControl Online, our Software as a subscription Service option came out in 2011.  We continue to support both on-premise and online clients and are committed to do so for the foreseeable future.  There are some clients who have very specific and very important reasons to keep their TimeControl systems in-house on their own data platform.  Often these are government or defense sector clients.

But let’s not think about the exceptions for a moment.  Let’s think about everyone else.

Imagine an organization that has heard the evangelism from Oracle and Microsoft and has decided to move some of its data systems to a subscription model.  Both Oracle and Microsoft are making it more and more awkward to choose and install an on-premise system so the incentive to shift might be high.

The savings to the organization is that they no longer need to have quite as much expertise in the IT department.  After all, at the subscription service center, security, monitoring, upgrades, system performance, database servers, operating system updates, network configuration, security patches and, of course, monitoring, updating the hardware servers themselves is handled as part of the subscription.

Now, with one or more systems successfully migrated, the need to handle these requirements internally evaporates as does the need to have that same level of IT expertise available in house.  Many of the IT personnel can be repurposed and there are the remaining in house systems to support but the numbers start to dwindle.

Who leaves first?

In many cases, there is natural attrition and the company is happy with that.  It’s better overall for morale if people are leaving of their own free will.  Older employees who are at retirement age or who can be given an incentive package to retire early take the plunge.  They are probably still young enough to continue in the IT industry if they wish working in other capacities.  But, those people who are leaving through retirement won’t be replaced or wont’ be replaced in the same numbers.

In some cases, some employees see the future coming and decide to seek other opportunities elsewhere.  In most cases, this will be the most experienced and capable employees.

For these two categories, the impact on the organization cannot be measured by just the number of employees.  A great deal of corporate memory, experience and skill go with these seasoned veterans.

We have had contacts at some of our clients announce to us they were retiring, then announce that they couldn’t leave quite yet.  Then announce they were retiring again.  Then announce that yes, they’d actually retired by had been retained by their old employer as a contractor so we’d be continuing to interact with them.  It’s not a unique story.

For the organization, the ability to continue to support the enterprise systems that remain becomes harder and harder and so it’s perhaps no surprise that in the last 2 years, we have had more on-premise TimeControl clients shift to the TimeControl Online subscription service than ever before.  We’ve made that easier in many respects by having an Evolve Program to help defray the costs of going online but the incentive is clearly coming from within.  And, this shift isn’t restricted to our small and medium clients.  It includes some of our largest clients as well.

We expect this migration to continue.

Our own commitment isn’t likely to change however until there are literally no clients left who wish to purchase or support TimeControl on-premise.  Until then we plan to support our clients both on premise and in the Cloud.

For more information on TimeControl Online, go to: Timecontrol.com/features/timecontrol-online.

To see more about choosing Online vs. On-premises, go to: TimeControl.com/how-to-buy.

To find out more about the Evolve program go to: The TimeControl Evolve Program. or contact one of our TimeControl experts at: Timecontrol.com/contact.

contractors, Crew Timesheet, TimeControl Industrial

Supporting contractors in your corporate systems

Contractors, TimeControl, TimeControl Industrial, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisWe often speak with organizations who are struggling with how to integrate their contractors into their corporate systems.  Payroll is rarely a problem.  The contractor is almost always paid by their own employer and that employer will submit an invoice for their person’s time.  It is in the project management and timesheet tracking areas where contractors become a more logistical nightmare.  This is exacerbated by environments where the individuals can change from week to week or even day to day.  When contractors are on longer-term engagements or working remotely, we hear about this more in relation to our standard TimeControl system.  When the contractors are taken from a pool each morning or each week, this comes up more in our TimeControl Industrial product in the Crew Management module.

TimeControl’s flexibility was designed to accommodate employees from multiple sources within the same organization.  Let’s look at that from a couple of different perspectives.

Authentication and Single Sign-on

Some clients report that to use any of their corporate systems, they need to on-board any workers whether they are full-time employees, part-time employees or contractors.  They use this workflow to record people for payroll, vacation and system access.  This can be a multi-step process that can result in additional hundreds or even thousands of employees receiving a corporate ID and can affect things like the number of licenses that must now be paid for in systems like Payroll or HR or Office systems that a contractor won’t ever use.  The challenge is so daunting and potentially expensive that organizations will isolate the contractors outside those systems where functions like timesheets will now be done completely separately.

TimeControl overcomes this by having authentication systems that are defined at the user level rather than globally.  On-premise staff can be authenticated in the corporate Single Sign-on  Active Directory such as Microsoft Entra or other LDAP mechanism. Contractors, on the other hand can use TimeControl’s own username/password login or alternate login mechanisms.  That frees up the corporation from having to bring every contractor on board the corporate infrastructure as though they are full-time employees.  Better yet, this can serve to avoid multiple timesheet systems (one for the contractor and one for the corporation) that don’t interact with each other.

It’s all together but that doesn’t leave the contractor company disenfranchised

With all the data for the timesheet now in one place, some contractor companies can be concerned they will lose access to their own employee’s timesheet information.  With TimeControl nothing could be further from the truth.  TimeControl’s can send data automatically to the contractor either by giving them limited and filtered access to TimeControl itself or by sending regular reports automatically on a schedule via email.  Data can even be sent via Excel so the contractors can automatically import that data into their own internal systems for their own payroll, billing and HR needs.  It’s a win-win.

Authentication and multiple approval layers

TimeControl’s approval mechanism is extensive and known as the most flexible in the industry.  Clients who use contractors are able to create an approval flow that will includes both the contractor’s representative and the corporation administration at the same time.  TimeControl is designed for this kind of challenge and it’s unique.  A timesheet could be approved on a remote site by both the contractor manager and the organization manager meaning that invoices from the contractor, once they arrive, will already have approvals from both sides.  Imagine how that will revolutionize the invoicing approval process at the end of the month with hours being pre-approved by both the client and the contractor.  We clients where invoice reconciliation times have dropped from weeks to hours.  We’re not kidding about that.
From weeks to hours.

It’s all about the flexibility

When you are merging the work of multiple contractors into the same system, clients often explain to us that the blending of corporate processes was a large barrier that TimeControl was able to overcome.  TimeControl’s timesheets can appear one way for one group of workers and very differently for other groups of workers.  When we weave in the additional functionality of TimeControl Industrial’s Crew Timesheet Entry and Enhanced Rates, the options become extensive.  Once entered, the data can be split, shared or divided up as need be in exports, reports and more.

We’ve mentioned a few things here you may want to look at some more.  HMS maintains a Manage Contractors solution portal with more information on using TimeControl with both Employees and Contractors at the same time.  If you’re interested in Crew Timesheets in particular or TimeControl Industrial in General, check out industrial.timecontrol.com or just contact us at timecontrol.com/contact to talk to one of our TimeControl specialists.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, timecontrol

Where does TimeControl stand in the use of AI?

TimeControl.ai, TimeControl, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter Vandersluis HMS started using AI techniques in TimeControl back in 1999.  Surprised?  Artificial Intelligence has been around awhile and you probably wouldn’t have noticed how we leveraged it back in 99.  At that time we created a communications protocol called “HMI” for TimeControl to transmit enormous volumes of TimeControl data through the Internet.  It had the capability of re-routing traffic based on what paths would be fastest.  With the invention of .Net and other Internet-based technologies we evolved from it.

While we are investigating how generative AI could help TimeControl administrators get the best use of TimeControl now, the questions we more commonly receive on the subject are almost all in one area:

“Can you make TimeControl use AI to automatically fill in my timesheet?”

The short answer is yes but don’t get too excited quite yet.  We have the technical capability to have AI determine what the most likely entry for any particular user’s timesheet.  The algorithm would look at the user’s scheduled work, for example, and perhaps past examples of timesheets submitted by that user and then figure out what the most likely entries would be.

The problem is, should we?

An auditor would say, ”Who entered this data?”  “TimeControl did it on its own,” we’d have to answer.  That would a problem for any audit.

“Ah,” you might answer, “but TimeControl could create the draft timesheet and the end user could just approve it.  Think of the time saved?”

That too is technically possible but imagine this scenario: A user is scheduled to work 30 hours this week on “Task A”. They’re scheduled to work 10 hours on “Task B”.  The end of the week comes and the clever AI generator says “Based on the scheduled work, the timesheet should probably look like the schedule”.  The pressure on the employee to just click Ok would be tremendous.  Perhaps they’d even justify it in their head by saying “I’ll make it up next week by doing the reverse.”

You can see the problem.  Algorithmic calculations of what should have happened don’t mix well with the simple recording of “what actually happened”.  So over the years, despite numerous requests, we’ve resisted putting our AI knowledge and our ability to automatically fill in workloads into the timesheet very deliberately.  This is perhaps why TimeControl is supported by both project administrators and Finance administrators at the same time.

We aren’t however, unsympathetic to the desires to reduce the workload in filling in a timesheet and, as a result, there are many features and functions within TimeControl that can reduce the time required to get one’s timesheet complete.  They include:

Preloading where TimeControl will automatically preload your timesheet with the project name and charge code to which the employee was assigned, and which fits into a particular filter of time.

Filtering which can filter out projects and charges the employee isn’t even working on.

Personal Preloads in which the employee defines projects and charges they always want to appear on their timesheet (think “Internal Meetings”) that they don’t want to go looking for.

Validation Rules and testing those rules on the timesheet.  This allows any errors to be caught before they’re even submitted for approval.

Notifications where TimeControl will remind you by email if your timesheet is late or about to be.

Copy where you can just copy a previous week’s timesheet in its entirety if you know you did the same thing this week as you did last week.

TimeControl can also just get you to the timesheet faster by configuring your personal preferences to have the timesheet entry screen automatically appear.

Keeping the structured financial and auditing rules of Finance, the fast-moving progress of project management and the speed at which end users want to move on with tasks they are not focused on is a balance we’ve had to manage since TimeControl was invented some 30 years ago.

Take a look at the Best Practices area of the TimeControl website for more ideas on how to improve efficiency with TimeControl either as an organization or as an individual.

Chris Vandersluis, podcast, project management, timecontrol

Our President, Chris Vandersluis is on the TrepTalks podcast!

Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Peter Vandersluis, TimeControl, HMS Software, HMS, TrepTalksIt’s always a thrill to hear about HMS, TimeControl and all the work and accomplishments we’ve made.  This week I’m excited to share a podcast I participated in on TrepTalks.  It’s a little longer than I usually get for a podcast but in just under an hour that gave us lots of opportunity to talk about the industry, the history of HMS and TimeControl and how TimeControl has become so successful both as a commercial timesheet system but also as a source of critical data that organizations of all sizes use for key business decisions about their projects and forward looking project investments.

I hope you like it.

The podcast can be found at: treptalks.com/interviews/chris-vandersluis-of-hms-software.

saas timesheet

Data Sovereignty matters more and more

When we started with TimeControl, the location of the client’s data had nothing to do with us.  We published the software with an on-premise license and the client decided where to install the product and where to locate the data.  The location, security and access to that data was completely decided by the client.  With the release of TimeControl Online a dozen years ago, that all changed.  TimeControl Online’s data was originally stored only in the US but as Software as a Service (SaaS) became more popular in medium to large corporate environments, the location suddenly became more an issue.

As it has with so many changes to the technical world, TimeControl adapted.  The TimeControl Data Location option, allows a client for a fee to decide from a wide range of countries where to locate their data.  The option is well established in our own technical department and has been taken advantage of over the years by clients requesting their data be stored and secured in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.  There are other countries and regions that can be supported as well including Brazil, South Africa, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, India, Australia, Japan and others.

The TimeControl Data Location option goes beyond just storing the data.  At HMS we understand data sovereignty.  So, when this option is used, we don’t backup or transport data to any other location outside the country or region where it is located.  We also don’t ever read client data directly from our Canadian offices in Montreal without a client’s direct request.  And, when the Data Location option is involved, we work with the client on how to access the data through their own systems to achieve whatever might be required to help with support or features.

HMS does manage these remote servers of course. We monitor all our Data Location servers just the way we do with the US-based servers on a 24×7 basis. We also handle all the upgrades and updates directly but that is an application-based update, the TimeControl application then handles upgrading the data locally in each location on its own.

Storing the data and self-restricting our access to the data is only part of the data sovereignty conversation.  It is then up to the client themselves to determine which users can access TimeControl and from where.  For global companies, that can take some thinking to make sure that both data sovereignty and user privacy are respected.

The Data Location option is available to TimeControl Online and TimeControl Industrial Online clients at any time.  If this is of interest to you, contact your TimeControl Account Executive at: TimeControl.com/contact

timecontrol

API Dynamic Documentation

Writing documentation for any software product is a significant challenge.  There’s the obvious of course, how each function works targeted at end-users.  For TimeControl that’s quite straightforward.  Our User Guide is about 100 pages (a little longer for TimeControl Industrial as it has to cover the use of Crew Timesheets and Materials).  It’s under the covers that Documentation takes on more significance.

With a product like TimeControl, the level of flexibility and configuration that is possible with the product makes those elements of documentation much longer.  No client needs to know everything about how to configure every element of TimeControl as clients only need to focus on that functionality and those processes that are specific to their needs.  But there’s still a lot of it.  The TimeControl Industrial Reference Guide is over 600 pages long.  There’s also the TimeControl Report Designer Guide that is a little over 200 pages, the soon to be defunct legacy guide at 48 pages, the Installation Guide for on-premise clients at 90 pages and the TimeControl Project Guide at 44 pages so far.  It’s a lot.  There are variations on those guides to accommodate TimeControl on-premise vs. TimeControl Online and TimeControl vs. TimeControl Industrial.

There’s more of course.  The website has numerous white papers and other collateral like videos and webcasts to talk more about specific solutions and processes.  And, there is this blog where we try to add detail to things that need to be showcased or clarified for specific circumstance.

While all of that may seem like a lot, there is another category of documentation we haven’t talked about and that is the API Guide.   The TimeControl API is the Application Programming Interface that lets you write programming code directly to the TimeControl  Server service to allow it to integrate with actions from other applications.

The API Guide is not an indexed PDF like the other guides.  It is dynamic.  The API Guide includes static elements which HMS has created to show how to authenticate, how to initiate code to access the API and more.  Topics include Authentication, Security, Errors, how to scale, versioning, rate limiting, OData support along with Examples and a complete list of Endpoints.  For each EndPoint you can see all possible operations and for each operation, there is example code.  Any changes to the API cause automatic updates to the API Guide so it is impossible for it to be out of date.

Taking advantage of the API requires expertise in both programming and TimeControl operations and the API Guide itself has the potential to execute code directly on TimeControl.  This can and should be prevented for most users by not giving API security authentication to most User Profiles.

Creating API code and executing it should be done in a sandbox first to make sure it will deliver the functionality you expect.  It’s a powerful tool for integration with other systems to extend functionality but should be used with care and caution.

This is the most flexible type of documentation we’ve ever included in TimeControl and it’s worth a look.

timecontrol

What is Referential Integrity in TimeControl?

We often talk about the auditability of TimeControl’s data but how is that accomplished behind the scenes.

Imagine this scenario.  We have an employee fill out a timesheet.  We save that timesheet.  It will be no surprise that the timesheet line and header tables have relationships with the employee table, and the charge table.  But then next week, the employee changes departments.  He is no longer in the technical department.  Now he is in the sales department where timesheet rules are different.  Plus he changed salary in the move.  He’s no longer paid the same as he was.  Plus, the charge codes he used have had changes too. They have different start and finish dates.

If I go to look at this person’s timesheet for last week, will it show the updated employee and charge code information?  It won’t.  The TimeControl design was created so that a timesheet can always be recreated as it was originally entered.  That means we have to freeze the employee and charge code data and save anything else relevant to the timesheet at the time.  In TimeControl, we do this at the time of posting.  That allows us to comply with stringent auditing requirements such as the Defense Contract Audit Agency but it also allows us to follow some common sense accounting.

If we did a costing report on the employee I just talked about, we’d reasonably expect that his cost to the company per week would be one value until the department and salary change and then a different value after that.  Also, costs to the tasks that person worked on would be at the original salary value until the department and salary change.  That would just make sense.  That, however, is not how many project-based timesheets work.

So, how do we do it?

Using referential Integrity.

It’s no surprise that TimeControl is based on a relational database.  Products like MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are all relational in nature.  But that’s not enough.  From the earliest versions of TimeControl we’ve embraced the concept of relating different records into specific records in different tables.  Here is how that works.

When a record is changed in a key table in TimeControl like the Employee Table or the Charge table, TimeControl saves the original record as a historical record and makes the newly changed record the current record.  All ties from, say, a timesheet line to a charge code line stays with the original record.

That’s huge.

So, the newly updated record is what you would see in the Charge Table or the Employee Table but you can look also at the historic records that are related to that entry from all the times the record has changed in the past.

The TimeControl Employee Table is called “Employee”.  The TimeControl Employee History Table is called EMP_HIS.  The TimeControl Charge Table is called CHARGE.  The TimeControl Charge History Table is called “CHR_HIS.

When creating reports or exports, it’s important to keep in mind that these tables are distinct and display distinct values.  Choosing the Employee Table will show only the information for that employee record that is from the current entry.  Choosing the Employee History Table will show all the associated entries for that Employee over time.

We never delete historic records.

If you look at a timesheet from a year ago, the employee for that timesheet might not even be in the company anymore.  But the employee record associated to each timesheet will be.

Referential Integrity is part of what keeps TimeControl simple on the outside but robust and flexible on the inside.

TimeRequest Wizard

TimeControl’s TimeRequest Wizard is truly magical

TimeControl has long had the ability to allow employees to request time off in the future using the TimeRequest feature.  Employees make a request for time off for an event such a vacation or expected sick leave and that goes to their supervisor for approval much like a timesheet would.  Then, once approved, that timesheet entry including the number of hours involved, the charge code and the rate code are automatically inserted into the appropriate timesheet.  If, for some reason, the employee goes to work on that day, they can just overwrite the entry with other timesheet lines.

An extension to the TimeRequest function is the TimeRequest Wizard.  This module allows an administrator to add pre-approved TimeRequest timesheet lines to many employee’s future timesheets at once.  It is most typically used for entering statutory holidays such as New Year’s Day or Christmas.

The TimeRequest Wizard has recently been enhanced with some great new features.

Administrators can set up different TimeRequest Wizard entries and then save them for later updating.  This means that one TimeRequest Wizard entry could be made for example for all the holidays in the US and associated with a filter for US-based staff then a different TimeRequest Wizard entry could be made for all Canadian holidays and associated with a filter for all staff based in Canada.

Since TimeRequest Wizards are now saved, they can also now be recalled and edited.  This provides an easy way for TimeControl administrators to onboard new staff with future holidays and to offboard staff so there is nothing still pending for their timesheets in the future.

The TimeRequest Wizard is an easy way for administrators to save a ton of time.  You can see the online lesson of the TimeRequest Wizard in action on the TimeControl Online Training page at:  timecontrol.com/resources/online-training/timecontrol-8.

timecontrol

Semiconductor company AMD and HMS collaborate on TimeControl Case Study

We are very excited to kick off blog posts for the new year with something we’ve been working on for some months.  In the summer of 2021, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and HMS started working on a case study to showcase how the world renowned semiconductor company has deployed TimeControl to its employees around the world.  That case study is now complete and you can read it here.

Our thanks to the TimeControl deployment team at AMD for their partnership as well as all the AMD staff who interact with TimeControl every day.

You can read or download the story here:
TimeControl.com/why-timecontrol/case-studies/amd.