A study on how biometric attendance machines can help in food management, providing meals to the employees in office canteens and other eating areas.
Organizing meals in offices:
Biometrics is proving its worth in the world of attendance and access control industry but there are so many unexplored areas where the biometrics is proving its iron and one such field is organized meals in office canteens, cafeterias and other public eating areas. Canteen Management System, a set of biometric fingerprint/smart card machine and software to deal with the meal management activities. Offices that provide meals to their employees prefer to obtain a system that would offer them the synchronized meal distribution with accurate calculation and minimized monetary losses. Some offices still practice manual measures of meal entries which give a tough time and lengthy algorithms to calculate the amount and also include errors and irregular transactions. The canteen management system is a systematic approach to eliminate the manual calculations and give synchronized and coordinated results.
How it works:
A biometric machine with a built-in thermal printer installed at the canteen area prints the food slips. The employee submits the food slip at the counter and receives the food. All the employee data which is saved in the biometric attendance machine is copied in the canteen machine through which it identifies the employees at the time of the meals.
There are many offices that prefer different meal formats or provide 3-time meals, a single machine solves the purpose with the feature known as:
Finger/card punch in accordance with meal timings: The selected food menu is saved in the machine but is valid according to the meal timings. for example; if slip for breakfast will be printed by pressing button no. 1 on the machine from 8 AM to 10 AM, slip for lunch thali can be opted by pressing the same no. in the lunch timings. The generated food slip bears the date and time which acts as a physical proof.
To reduce the confusion and equal food distribution amongst the employees, the software holds another useful feature which is:
Set daily/monthly food limit: the software helps in setting the daily/monthly food limit by capping it for every employee, which means the employees can use the food limit given by the office management on a daily or monthly basis. However the limit can be changed as per the user and can be increased or decreased.
Per Day Count of total food slips generated: To counter the problem of food slip count mismatch, the machine can also display the total number of food slips generated per day.
Check on meal re-consumption: Meals can be managed by applying meal re-consumption filters which will restrict the meal slip to be re-generated again if the slip for the same time meal has already been generated which will make sure the meals are equally distributed within the employees.
Prepaid/postpaid plans: in terms of meal amount addition/deduction, prepaid or postpaid plans can be opted by which food credits can either be uploaded in the month’s starting or can be calculated at the month’s end.
Simplifying Vendor- Customer Relations:
Canteen management system offers you various valuable features and reports which provide transparency between the vendor and office management in terms of food consumed finances, data discrepancy and other sort of reports through which calculations and adjustments can go inaccurate. Reports like:
Item master, to add and remove the food items from the food menu,
Employee and Designation master, to add and remove the employees and their designations to allow/remove several options and authorities for meals,
Category and department master, to add/remove different categories and office departments,
Cash deposit entries,
Employee transaction history,
Employee information, whether they are on prepaid/postpaid plan,
Item information, the food items, their rates, and other info.,
Employee’s daily, monthly consumption reports, and summary,
Employee meal account balance,
Import/export cash deposit
Give user-friendly and clear reports to maintain transparency amongst the administration and the food vendor in terms of meal consumption, finances, special allowances and facilities. The canteen management system gives a one stop solution for an aligned and synchronized meal culture in offices and workplaces.
