Software feature: track proximity of employees for COVID-19 safety

Our central software has a new feature, designed to help you manage your workforce safely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Track and Trace reporting allows you to select someone in the system who you want to check on as a potential infection risk. For example, they may have just flagged with a high temperature that morning on our facial recognition and temperature checking system, or they may already be at home self-isolating and you want to do a retrospective check.

This is very easy to do! Below is an outline of how you can use the track and trace, and what the results mean. They can be reported upon in hard copy or Excel.

Using Track and Trace

You will need to click on Reports and then the Track and Trace option to display the screen partially shown below.

This part of the screen is where various filters can be applied to limit the displayed tracking information.

These filter and selection controls are provided, as indicated above.

• Reporting Range – enter from and to dates to define the period to be reported upon. Next click on the Search button to load transactions for the selected period. A count of the number of transactions found is displayed.
• Employee Selection – an individual must now be selected from the employee drop down list. This is the person whose contacts will be traced. Enter all or part of their name or employee code into the filter box the limit the employee list to matched entries. Note the employee list is only populated by those employees contained within the retrieved transactions of the selected report period.
• Event Types – this drop down lists all the different event types found within the selected period. Unticking an event will exclude it from the matching exercise.
• Device – this drop down lists all the different scanning devices used within the selected period. Unticking a device will exclude it from the matching exercise.
• Time Restrictions – by default a one hour time restriction is applied (both before and after) when matching transactions. First the system determines when the selected person has clocked or gained access. Then a search is made for all the employees scanning within a window beginning one hour before and ending one hour after, the selected person’s scanning. Alter the Before Use and After Use times to extend or reduce this window.

Click the Show Results button when all entries have been completed. The lower section of the Track and Trace screen is populated with results. Separate tabs provide Summary and Detail views of matching information.

In the example above it can be seen that the selected person encountered seven different employees when they were clocking or gaining access within the default two hour window. The times of their first and last meetings are shown in their respective columns.

The Device Count column shows how many separate devices were involved in the employee meetings. In this example just one was involved. The Meeting Count column gives the total number of encounters per employee.

The detailed breakdown of this summary is available on the Detail tab.

The detail screen lists all the encounters between the selected person and other employees. The Device column details the scanning equipment where employee encounters took place. The original time is when the selected person scanned at the device.

The matched time is when the employee scanned at the same device. The Separation column shows the difference, in time, between these two scans. A negative difference is where the employee scanned before the selected person. A positive difference is where the employee scanned after the selected person. By default the detail display is ordered by ascending separation difference.

The likelihood of employees being in close physical proximity with the selected, potentially infected person, increases the smaller the separation time is.

You can Click on the Print Summary or Print Detail buttons to generate either a hardcopy report or excel spreadsheet of the respective information.

This Track and Trace reporting is available in version 4.4.0.24 and above of our software. If you already have our products and want to check which version you have, please feel free to drop us an email or contact your account manager directly.