Joshua Hatami
Hyo Jin Kim
David Fitzpatrick

What are the pros and cons of using an employee to build you a custom system?

There are various pros and cons of using an employee to build you a custom system. Although an employee may be good in technical areas such as software development, does not mean they know how to produce the most accurate as well as cost efficient systems. On the flip side if you are confident in this employee and know he is able to produce good work you really have nothing to worry about. If an employee built us a system we would be giving all the authority of the system to the employee. This employee would be required to keep track of time punches, labor expenses, etc. An in house employee would give managers quick responses throughout times of operation. A con would be giving the employee the power to make the necessary purchases, as well as putting the burden of the system on his shoulders, such as in cases where the system requires maintenance. This is something you would want to work out with the employee before hand, just so you could make sure the employee is not overspending. You would also want to make sure the employee keeps all receipts in case something went wrong with a component and the software needed some maintenance. As stated in the description time clock manufacturers, and software development companies are offering affordable rates on new products, increasing the number of in house builds. Some cons associated with the new technologies are, time and money. It will cost more to build and implement the system, and also take time for the employees to get use to the new methods, especially the older employees. A good way to go about this would be to leave your old system running, while building the prototype which is known as a smaller scale representation or working model of the users’ requirements or the proposed design for an information system. While working on the prototype you could take this time to train your employees on the new system, while keeping the older system in place for the time being.

What are the pros and cons of purchasing a COTS time and attendance application and outsourcing custom development?

Outsourcing custom development is a very useful way to keep all employees focused on day-to-day operations while another company develops and maintains the employee tracking system. Outsourcing is known as an arrangement by which one organization provides a service or services for another organization that chooses not to perform them in-house. If The Broadway Café’ wishes to outsource they will be ensured that nobody is familiar with ways to cheat the system. By cheating the system we mean employees finding ways to punch in for one another. With a punch clock based system it may be easy for an employee to enter another employees credidentials. This can result in confusion as well as a loss to the company in regards to labor. Time and attendance tracking would be one way to reduce the cheating of the system. Some cons in regards to this would once again be time and money. It is going to take time to receive the information you need, such as what employee was late, or what employee did not arrive and how many times has it occurred, as well as how long it will take to receive the information. However just like the employee created system the outsourced system is able to provide us with labor rates, regarding peek hours, and down hours. These are very important to know because we prefer not to be overstaffed when business is slow, or understaffed when the business is busy. We need to remember we are looking for a cost effective system, not a priority based system.

How will your older employees feel about the new system and what can you do to ensure a smooth transition?

At first the older employees will more than likely feel as if the new system is going to be a time consuming, irrelevant process, and prefer to keep things as they are. This is where we insure our older employees that the new system will help the company in many ways, such as cutting costs, and making sure their time punches are accurate down to the last second. We can assure the older employees that they will be compensated for every second they work. By assuring this we can then talk to the older employees about how much better the new system will be than the last one. Ensure them that the process will in fact be easier, but it may take a little practice to get used to, just as everything does. We will want to also tell the employees that the new software will be extensively tested, referring to the phase in the (SDLC) known as testing which refers to brining all the project pieces together into a special testing environment to eliminate errors and bugs, and verify that the system meets all the business requirement defined in the analysis phase. Given this information the older employees should feel at ease, and begin to accept the implementation of the new system.