Contractor staff on site

Monday, six in the morning, and twelve people from a refurbishment contractor are standing at the gate. The crew leader has the list in an email, the gatehouse has a notebook, and the maintenance manager is still on the way in. It usually ends with someone writing the names down by hand and letting the whole group in on their say-so, because the work is due to start at seven. A week later nobody can say how many people from that company were in the hall yesterday.

A work list of named people

A work list in TraxSystem contains the company, the start and end dates, the target site and a list of named people. The company is selected from the access control register of organisations, the same one used by reception and vehicle entry control.

The list of people rarely arrives in a convenient form. More often it is part of an email or a spreadsheet filled in the company’s own way, so there are three ways to enter it: by hand, by pasting from the clipboard or by importing from Excel. Pasting copes with text in which the date of birth and the document number are on the same line as the surname. There is a ready spreadsheet template to send to the company. Its columns match what your deployment requires, so it contains no fields that nobody checks anyway.

Which details are mandatory is set in the configuration. One plant requires the date of birth, another the document number, a third the PESEL number (the Polish national identification number). The PESEL number is stored masked, with only the digits agreed during implementation left visible.

Cards for temporary workers from a separate pool

Cards for contractors are kept in a different pool from visitor cards. The separation makes sense for accounting and practical reasons: a visitor card comes back after an hour, a temporary worker’s card stays with them for the two weeks of a refurbishment, and mixing the two ends with an empty pool at reception at nine in the morning.

A temporary worker’s permissions come from the card. The access role is attached to a specific card and passes with it to the person, so the crew gets exactly the passages the contract provides for. At any given time a card belongs to one person, and the system won’t let it be issued a second time. A person on the list without a card won’t get in, because the gate does not confirm entries by hand.

The pass office assigns the card, reception hands it over

At most plants, setting up the list and handing over the card are jobs for two different people at two different desks, so TraxSystem separates these steps in the data as well. The pass office assigns the card: it takes it out of the pool and reserves it for a specific person. Reception hands it over when that person turns up at the window, and only the handover makes the card start opening doors.

Between assignment and collection, the card sits in a drawer at reception, sometimes for several days. If it worked straight away, every read of that card would record an entry under the name of a person who had never seen it, and that name would end up on the list of people present.

Reception has its own screen for this, opened with one button from visitor handling. It shows the lists valid today, and inside each list the named people: who has which card, who hasn’t been given one yet, who has already handed it back and who is on site right now. The name search covers all lists at once, because reception starts from the person standing at the window. The handover is recorded with the name of the person who issued the card, and a mistake can be undone with one button, without involving the office.

Apart from handing over cards, reception changes nothing here: it doesn’t set up lists or assign cards. That is the pass office’s job, and the separation of roles is reflected in the permissions as well.

Card return on the last day of work

TraxSystem treats the last day of work separately, because that is when the card pool quietly empties: the contract ends, and the card stays in someone’s pocket. On that day the card stops opening the normal exit and directs the person to the card return reader, which physically retains the card and immediately releases it in the system.

That leaves the cases where the card comes back some other way: handed over in person, lost, or the crew followed someone else out. Then staff release the card from the list of issued cards. If the person whose card is being released is shown as present, the release also closes their visit, and the confirmation window shows their first name and surname. Without a card that person could not have registered their exit, and presence without a card distorts the evacuation list.

Cards from lists whose work ended long ago go back to the pool by themselves, after a set number of days’ grace period. The automatic process does not touch people who are shown as present; their visit is closed only when someone deliberately confirms it.

Limit on a temporary worker’s working days

If your plant has a limit on the number of days the same person can work as a temporary worker, TraxSystem calculates it from the dates of the lists that person appears on, including other companies’ lists. When the person is registered on another list, it shows the result, that is, how many days are left, and if the limit is exceeded it blocks that person from being added.

A match on first name and surname alone, without confirmation by a document, is treated differently: the system shows a warning and does not count it towards the block, because John Smith from two different companies may well be two different people. In that case a person makes the decision.

Contractor staff on the evacuation list

Every card passage updates the presence status of the person on the list and leaves an event in the monitor. People on work lists appear on the same list of people present as employees, visitors and drivers at the dock. The evacuation muster uses this list, so the question “who is on site right now?” has one answer.

A visit that nobody has closed is closed automatically once the maximum length of stay has been exceeded. Without that, a month later the list would still show a crew that left through a side gate halfway through the refurbishment.

In reports, a person on a work list is a separate presence type, so you can ask directly how many people from a given company were on site in a chosen period and for how long.

What contractor records do not do

The records do not replace the contract or the health and safety documentation. The system records entries and exits, while medical checks, qualifications and job-specific training stay where they were. The exception is the induction, which can be carried out on a terminal and recorded together with a signature.

TraxSystem does not know about employment outside your site. The day limit is calculated from the work lists in this system, so if the same person is working for another client at the same time, the system doesn’t see it and has no way of seeing it.

The system does not recognise people biometrically. Identity is based on the card and the details on the list, so two people from the same crew swapping cards is beyond the reach of a card-based system.

Without an issued card, the system won’t let anyone in. It was designed that way, because confirming entries by hand on someone’s say-so turns the records back into a notebook. Assigning a card in the office isn’t enough either: until the person collects the card at reception, the reader won’t accept it.

The records do not cover people who came in without registering. That is a limitation of every card-based system, and it has to be taken into account when planning the muster.

Frequently asked questions about contractor records

Work lists in the demo

In the demo we go through the whole process on demo data: pasting the list from an email, issuing cards, entering with a card at the reader, the reception view and returning cards when the work is finished. Work lists are part of the People access control module, so the pricing configurator shows the price once you select that module.

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