Stromberg Products

Stromberg Success Stories » City Furniture

Industry: Hospitality
Employees: 200
Interface: Ceridian

City Furniture knew how employees out-smarted traditional time clocks. Stromberg installed state-of-the-art Biometric time clocks to outwit them.

Florida-based City Furniture has 13 retail locations that offer affordable, high-quality home furnishings in fun-to-shop showrooms. Trained sales associates encourage visitors to enjoy fresh-baked cookies and hot coffee while strolling through their showrooms. These kid-friendly stores even provide interactive video games and music videos to make shopping fun for the whole family.

Challenge: Inefficient and inaccurate time and attendance records

City Furniture needed an automated time and attendance system for the same reasons most retailers do: to eliminate falsified time and attendance entries and increase efficiency and accuracy. And like other retailers, City Furniture wanted a system that could better account for vacation and sick leave, improve employee scheduling and project time reporting, and enhance labor analysis.

This is particularly important since City Furniture employs a large number of hourly workers.

Solution: Stromberg Enterprise for foolproof punches and better reporting

City Furniture purchased Stromberg Enterprise time and attendance software paired with the Cyber Series Biometric Time Clock. The system interfaces with an IBM AS/400 file connected to a Microsoft SQL server that collects the data and deposits it into a homegrown payroll system.

Biometric time clocks are becoming the device of choice when it comes to recording employee time. Clerks simply enter a PIN number, place a finger on the glass, and the device verifies the identity of the clerk and records the date and time. During the course of the day, clerks use the device to clock in and out for lunch and check out for the day.

Retaining a history of an employee’s time and attendance activity over a long period of time and conducting exception reporting have been particularly helpful to Steve Wilder, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of City Furniture. “You can flag an employee’s record as an exception if he or she is more than 15 minutes late. Then you can go back in history and get a report of every time the employee was late during the last six months ― a helpful piece of information for employee reviews.”

Benefits of cross-punching

For retailers, the move toward automated time and attendance systems shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, market research firm Giga Information Group predicts that time and attendance solutions in retail will grow significantly over the next several years, from slightly more than $250 million in 2006.

One of the most important benefits of an automated time and attendance system is its ability to track labor hours and payroll costs throughout the organization via cross-punching. “An employee might stay in his home department until 2:00 p.m., when he may be called to leave that department to pull stock out of the aisles for an upcoming delivery,” Wilder explains.

“This system provides the employee with a system that can properly record when he left one department for another, which helps a lot when you want to allocate costs to various departments. The system’s reporting capabilities have been especially helpful in managing and controlling overtime.”

A significant Return On Investment (ROI)

According to Giga, the return on investment for automated time and attendance systems is significant. A 2002 market report found that retailers can:

  • Reduce timekeeping staff time and error rates by 70 percent or more.
  • Lower hourly labor costs from 1 percent to 3 percent.
  • Substantially reduce payroll cycle timing issues.
  • Reduce labor costs, optimize staff, and minimize overtime with more precise staff planning and scheduling.

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