The inaugural meeting was held on Thursday 6th December and was attended by the mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street. Representatives from PwC, Fujitsu, Colmore Tang, Aston University, Coventry University, the NHS, Walsall College and the West Midlands Combined Authority attended. 

 

Street said: "The West Midlands is the place to be for digital: we’ve got the fastest-growing digital sector outside London, we will act as the UK’s testbed for ultra-fast 5G internet, and we have ambitious plans to double our digital industry’s economic output over the next decade.

 

"To do that, we need a pipeline of skilled, qualified digital staff: and we want those staff to come from within the West Midlands.

 

"The Digital Skills Partnership will take a very local view – developing training provision and new career pathways across the West Midlands.

 

"It will make suggestions to improve how we recruit and retain the skilled digital staff we need, and ultimately help double the size of our digital economy to create a sustainable £9bn industry for the future."

 

Source: Insider Media

 

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It is a surprising but true fact that even companies in the technology sector, who work hard every day to solve people’s problems with technology, can end up using very low-tech solutions for basic employee management tasks. This admirable new digital growth partnership should ensure that they don’t end up encouraging companies to fall into the same trap. 

 

The prime example of this is wasting countless sheets of paper in measuring attendance. Examples of this are numerous: paper timesheets for hourly staff, visitor sign-in sheets for health and safety and security, holiday booking forms … All of these need to be approved and/or signed by multiple people, which wastes time that would be better spent elsewhere. 

 

Every time a form passes through human hands, the chance of an innocent error occurring increases – and that’s not even getting started on the possibilities of time fraud. Finally, working like this is also a massive waste of paper, since these documents are generally only used once before they’re thrown away. 

 

Here at Time and Attendance Midlands, we offer powerful specialised software which can gather all this data for you and present it in an easy to understand format. This can be useful for many different departments.

 

Our time and attendance management system (hardware and software) takes the labour out of payroll hours and helping HR spot attendance problems by collecting employees’ clocking data and recording it in the central database. This data can be easily checked and processed by multiple departments, and reports can be generated using our step-by-step wizard or advanced reports settings depending on user requirements.