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More industrial disputes are expected in the New Year at a well-known canning company after management and unions failed to resolve a row over pay. Members of the Unite union at the Heinz site in Wigan took strike action over the festive period. Heinz said it had "worked hard to improve what we already believed was a very fair offer" and was disappointed with the outcome of the talks. The company said the current offer to workers was equivalent to 4% one year and 3% in the next. Tensor supplies an array of complete Smart Card Time and Attendance systems which establish comprehensive user-definable working patterns, rosters and shifts. One of these is WinTA Start, which includes a T32xx Smart Card clocking station; 25 contactless Smart Cards; and software including all the features to manage time and attendance recording for up to 50 people. Our support structure is second-to-none since a helpdesk network is available via modem, telephone or online. More help can be gained via the website http://www.support.tensor.co.uk

Drivers on the London Underground are threatening to walk out on April 29, which is the date of the royal wedding, when Prince William and Kate Middleton are due to wed. Drivers last went on strike on Boxing Day, and the dispute over bank holiday pay remains unresolved. Management took legal action to halt the Boxing Day walkout but it failed and the strike went ahead, causing disruption on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Unions demand triple pay and a day off in lieu for working on bank holidays. Tensor’s smart card and biometric Time & Attendance and security systems provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use system to record employees' hours of working and site security. Tensor’s contactless cards, key fobs, or fingerprint biometrics represent the fastest and safest method of recording attendance. The large colour display on the Tensor T32xx clocking station makes it simple for employees to confirm their clockings, check flexi-time hours or make job-booking transactions. An illuminated keypad provides ease of text input and use.  

Thieves drained a petrol station of fuel in a record haul for the south Wales area of more than 10,000 litres. Police have appealed for information and are keen to trace the owner of a car seen in the forecourt around the time of the theft, as well as some passers-by who could be key witnesses. Neath and Port Talbot police commented: "There was no damage caused to the equipment at the filling station, which suggests that this crime was committed by a very professional and organised team." Using Tensor Access Control software your firm can be assured that you will receive a simple to use, highly secure way of controlling access to areas or buildings, as well as monitoring who is present 24 hours a day. This is particularly useful for sites that are empty or unattended for long periods. CCTV tracking is a powerful option as the video clips show "evidence quality" footage of forced entries, alarm events, or users of our contactless Smart Cards gaining access or being denied.  

Union leaders have called on ministers to "reopen negotiations in the light of this ballot decision" after Whitehall mandarins blocked new proposals to change redundancy terms. The government wants to reform the civil service system, saying it is too expensive to continue in a climate of austerity. The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said more than 80,000 of its members, a third of those balloted, took part in the vote and rejected the new measures. Tensor’s user-friendly time and attendance payroll and personnel software reports enables your firm’s HR department or management to instantly check the hours worked by an employee, shift or department. In the Employee screens an index tab system is used to hold different categories of information. Some of these are user definable fields, including user definable tables and arrays. Each user can define their own reports and save these for future printing; either automatically or on-demand. In many cases, users only require to 'view' data, thereby saving the time and cost of actual printing to paper.  

Around 200,000 jobs will be cut by councils in England this year following cuts in central government funding, according to a union’s claims. The warning came from GMB official Brian Strutton who fears councils will rush through redundancies before the end of the financial year in March as a last resort. Local government minister Grant Shapps rejected these figures and instead urged councils to save money and protect front line services by cutting executive pay and pooling activities. Saving money at your business can be facilitated with a Tensor time and attendance system which controls and monitors wages and shifts. Overtime is easily monitored by the WinTA software, with up to four different pay bands in each shift. Bands are selected based on the time and the number of hours worked. You can set breaks to activate between set times, and/or after a minimum number of hours have been worked. Groups are used to define sequences of shift patterns. Rolling Groups repeat a block of shift patterns. The block can contain any number of days or weeks.

A rehabilitation unit in Lancashire is to shut as part of a £18 million total savings review by Blackpool Teaching Hospitals Trust. The trust has served 55 notices of compulsory redundancy to people at the 40-bed Wesham Hospital whose jobs are at risk in the review, although they are hoping to redeploy staff. It is also requesting voluntary redundancies from non-clinical staff. Services and patients will be transferred to other nearby hospitals over the coming months. Time and attendance technology from Tensor is networked so the system can control multiple sites, which is useful if your staff are being transferred to other office or department. The built-in report generator makes it simple to get the information you need from the smart card operated system. Standard reports contained in the software include: Weekly Clock Card, Payroll Summary, Absence Summary, Exceptions, Job Booking, and Working Time Directive Compliance. Fingerprint recognition systems are also available to compliment the smart cards, providing a two-fold identification process for added security.  

Refuse collectors are meeting officials from Birmingham City Council in an attempt to avert a strike over a long-running pay dispute. Unions who represent the rubbish collectors are to speak with Council representatives after a recent vote was taken to only work 50 per cent of their shifts over a two-day period. Unions said a pay review meant some refuse workers would lose £4,000 a year. The council replied it had to change pay rates to meet equality laws. Issues of pay and hours are simplified, and will save your organisation time and money into the bargain, using Tensor personnel and attendance monitoring systems. Our smart card technology allows your employees to quickly clock in and out, with the time and attendance software accurately recording attendances. The modular and upgradable WinTA network – suitable for all business sizes – has many additional features, one of which is Annualised Hours. Here it is possible to keep track of time worked throughout the year by a particular employee.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), one of the oldest-ever forces, is championing the use surveillance camera technology. Last year 2,512 wanted people – including suspected murderers– were successfully identified by MPS thanks to the use of CCTV. A statement from the force said: “We’ve had great success with CCTV. These are people who often would have fled the scene and potentially ‘got away with it’ had it not been for CCTV. There’s no doubt that CCTV continues to help us make London a safer place.” Tensor and our partners CCTV Surveillance Ltd supply and maintain digital CCTV systems that are integrated to work with a standard PC monitor. This has been achieved through the development of sophisticated CCTV software. The software allows individual users to set their own criteria for viewing selected footage from particular CCTV cameras within the network. Password and security features limit the viewing of certain cameras to specific groups of people, enabling you to securely manage who is able to see particular areas of activity.

An MP has questioned why a company that is putting 900 Welsh workers out of a job – by shifting production to Hungary – is now hoping to secure millions in public subsidy to open a new plant in England. Vale of Glamorgan Labour Assembly Member Jane Hutt said of Bosch’s plan to shut down its plant in the Vale of Glamorgan and bid for a new technology site at Worcester: “This news will come as a real body blow to those workers who have lost their jobs in the South Wales plant.” Moving sites is made smoother with a Tensor Time & Attendance system based on smart card technology, which allows your employees to clock in and out extremely quickly. This information can be used to ensure that European working time regulations are not breached and can be exported in many forms to allow integration with existing payroll software. Your employees’ time and attendance data is gathered from the clocking machines and available in real time. Our WinTA network is able to work over national and international boundaries.  

As part of a cost-cutting exercise Cornwall Council is looking into the future of around 220 public toilets in the county. The body wants a complete overview of the service included in a wider programme of budget savings, so it is asking local authorities to look at how £1m could be saved in efficiencies over the next four years. Among the options being considered include delegating local public convenience management to parish councils or reducing opening times. The council said that every location can be judged on its own merits. Tensor toilet turnstiles incorporate a coin box set-up so that organisations or local authorities can continue to offer public toilet facilities. Generous revenues can be generated from the turnstiles for going towards their maintenance. Half height toilet turnstiles provide an unobtrusive method of controlling access to your toilet facilities. Styled in a tripod design, both single and double half height turnstiles are available, allowing you to double your throughput while keeping the amount of space used by the turnstile to a minimum.  

An innovative technical device is keeping members of the public aware of car crime issues in their neighbourhood. Solar-powered talking signs are reminding motorists about leaving no valuables on display so that items are not stolen from vehicles. Police in Greater London will also be putting up ordinary signs alerting about car crime. A Southall Police statement said: "Reducing thefts from vehicles is a priority for us. A lot of car crime is random, and cars are broken into to steal anything on show." Tensor’s sophisticated visitor and access control systems can include automatic barriers to help secure your car parking facilities and control vehicle access. At this point you are able to allow or deny access to any person visiting your site. Barriers can be controlled remotely, from your reception area, or locally, from a guard post next to the barrier. As well as an effective method of security, the barriers can monitor the number of vehicles travelling through any given access point. All automatic car park barriers are supplied complete and are ready to accept power and data connections.  

Huge cuts to Ealing Council's budget are worse than initially indicated, which will bring jobs and frontline services under threat. The authority must save an extra two per cent after receiving its grant allocation from central funds, making a total of £66 million to be cut over three years. The council said that a list of community and volunteer groups which will be affected will be sent to the council cabinet in the spring. Its leader Julian Bell said: “It's very disheartening when we have to make that level of cuts.” Tensor’s WinTA Lite is the latest in our proven range of Windows™ based time and attendance products, from simple collection of employees' clocking data, through to job costing and extensive labour hours analysis. Software reports show jobs that are over budget or those approaching their budget limit, useful if your company is finding finances are tight. This information can also be exported to spreadsheets. The Export to Payroll function links to Sage, Pegasus, Centrefile, Unipay, Moorepay, and other popular payroll systems.