Tensor.NET Version 4.4.1.4 – Reporting Facility Upgrades, Clocking Amendments, FaceStation2 Functionality Improvements and Numerous other Enhancements

Tensor is proud to announce that our workforce management / security software platform, Tensor.NET, has achieved yet another important milestone with the release of branch version 4.4.1.x. Version 4.4.1.4 is the first new version in this series and provides a very large number of new features, additions, fixes and customer resolutions.

New Features and Enhancements

1. FaceStation 2 Functionality Enhancements: The Suprema Biometric Facial Recognition Reader (FaceStation2) has many enhancements implemented into this version. Some of the main features added include:

• FaceStations can now be used with Access Control;
• Fire Alarm and Hooter Inputs support added to Standalone FaceStations;
• Support for Alphanumeric Employee Code enrolment. A new user options setting has been added to “Use Alphanumeric Employee Codes Where Possible”;
• Additional development for Thermal detection has been integrated ;
• Controls have been implemented to restrict the storage of employee temperature readings. Customers are able to switch ‘on’ or ‘off’ whether they want these saved or not;
• A new alert “Access denied temp too high” has been added. This offers customers the ability to deny staff access to site if their temperature reading is too high and notification emails can be sent to designated recipients;
• A new alert “Abnormal Temperature” has been added. This offers customers the ability to deny staff access to site if their temperature reading is too low and notification emails can be sent to designated recipients;
• Additional development has allowed specific Fire Roll Call and Job costing allocation from the FaceStation.

2. Appointments for Visitors or Contractors that are created then cancelled would show in the Receptions Appointment Diary. When many cancellations occur, the day diary could ‘clog up’ the view panel! Changes have been made to include a ‘Hide Cancelled Appointments’ option.

3. Amending Clockings – New enhancements have been made to the system’s Amend clockings screen. These include:

• The number of pay columns that can be configured in the Display Options dialog of Amend Clockings has been increased from 20 to 40;
• A new option has been added so that Absences can be added directly from the clockings screen without needing to look up the holiday times and adding them manually. This means full and half days can be added and will pick up the shift times, equivalent to booking directly in the planner;
• A new User Option setting has been added “Retain Auto Clock Out Exception” and can be found under System Configuration > Auto Clock Out Settings. If you are auto clocked out and the out time is then amended to your actual time, the auto clock out exception is removed from the day. If you enable this setting, the system will retain the auto clock out exception for reporting purposes. This was an old legacy setting which has been brought into this version.
• A new Load Physical Clockings checkbox has been added to the Amend Clockings Weeks tab! An addition to the previous version where this was added to the Dates tab. Ticking this setting and then selecting the ‘Refresh’ replaces all processed clockings or manually entered data with the physical clockings for the employee(s) and date(s) selected. Before committing to this change the user will be alerted before making the changes as shown here.

4. Changes to Reporting facility: Tensor.NET’s Reporting facility has undergone some changes in this version. These changes include:

• A ‘Track & Trace’ report has been added to give a list of employees that a given employee has come in contact within a period. The report has been modified to include a search facility for employees.
• A new feature on the systems Clockcard Report where Monthly Totals are now available. The new feature allows the Clockcard Report to output monthly Payband totals. When produced, the report has the ability to show only the group totals hiding the detail rows.
• A new option in auto reports for ‘Next 6 Months’ has now been added, this allows users to configure an auto report that can produce results for this time period.
• A reporting modification has been created to be able to show Job clockings with Payband columns where the data will match the job booking summary tab on the job booking summary.
• Development work has been carried out to allow an automatic import of driver’s start and end times into Tensor.NET via a CSV file.

5. Support has been upgraded for the OMNIKEY reader in this version. The latest MiFare Omnikey readers are now compatible with this version of Tensor.NET.

6. Employee Skill Tasks Enhancements

• The Skills option has been enhanced with new features to allow employees to gain skills after watching an Induction video or viewing a document through the SSM. The new features allow the automated allocation of an Employee Task on account creation within the SSM. These tasks are created and an Employee can then complete the video or read a document, skills are then created automatically and stored against the employee record.

• This feature has also been further enhanced to allow the ability to add employee skill details directly on the skill screen so that you don’t need to open up every employee to add the skill. Clicking on the ‘Employees’ option above and then ’Show Non-Holders’ to display all employee without the skill. Skills can now be added directly through this screen.
• Adding Skills through the Course Details has also been redesigned. Previously, to add skills you had to click add, select the skill from the combo box, click ok and repeat. This is was too slow when selecting lots of skills so the allocation style has changed so multiple skills can be selected as shown.

7. A new setting has been added in the User Options screen, navigate to Environmental > Screen Defaults/Behaviour > Employee > General to show the setting“Use Alphanumeric Employee Codes Where Possible”. This new setting can either be Enabled or Disabled.

8. Employee Records – A new User Options setting has been created so that restrictions can be applied to the minimum length of the identity number for employees. Previously, this was hard coded to be at least 4 digits. The user options setting can be found in Environmental > Screen Defaults / Behaviour > Employee > General. The new setting “Identity Number Min Length” will allow values between 1 and 8.

9. An update has been made to the wording on User Options settings. System Configuration > Auto Clockout Settings > Book off Roll Call on Auto-ClockOut.

• Access Control > Auto Roll Call Off > Core Time – Auto Roll Call Off
• Access Control > Auto Roll Call Off > Core Time – Auto Roll Call Off Time
• Access Control > Auto Roll Call Off > System Wide – Auto Roll Call Off
• Access Control > Auto Roll Call Off > System Wide – Auto Roll Call Off Time

The wording has been changed to read “Use this setting with caution as employees may still be on site but not appear on the roll call.

10. The T32xx Clock now has a new date format dropdown as per the T8526 Access Controller. This allows the selection of v1 or v2 date format on the device.

11. Enhancements have been made to the Employee Bulk Amend feature. You can now ‘Override Entitlements’ and ‘Carry overs’. Users can now configure add/subtract/set values of days or hours for a category and a year.

12. The employee pandemic section has been further enhanced to include a Vaccine selection drop down option. This enables the user to select which vaccine the employee has had. The ‘State’ option has also been updated to include “Vaccinated – 1st Dose”, “Vaccinated – 2nd Dose” and “Vaccinated – Single Dose”. This will enable users to log the various stages of employee vaccinations.

13. Changes have been made to allow for an automated system to notify employees when staff have Annual Leave or any other configured absence booked in the coming days. This modification allows Tensor.NET to send email alerts for any absences that have been booked in the future.

14. PeopleHR Integration. The previous PeopleHR plug-in has been further enhanced to allow the use of additional absences to be linked into Tensor.NET. On the previous plug in, Holidays and Sickness were the only two codes available, the new changes allow Maternity/Paternity and Other Events to be linked in the same manner.

Fixes

• A fault was found within the systems Role management setup where restrictions in place were not reflecting the assigned users in the correct way. The Absence details dialog had key controls keyed out preventing the absence from being booked, despite having the permissions set correctly. This has now been fixed.
• A fault was found where the Audit report was not being generated on the Absence Planner. After booking an Absence, you can right click the absence and select ‘View Audit’ to display a report with full details, this has now been fixed.
• A fault was found where the ‘Delete’ button on Facial templates tab is not responding. This seemed to time out and then generating an error log. This problem has now been fixed.
• A fault was found on the Exception report where employees were still appearing when they had no exception. It was found this was a conflict due to the ‘Inserted Break’ infringement, this has been fixed.
• A faults was found with the display of the employee temperature. When clocking IN on a FaceStation Unit, the last temperature is not being updated on the Employee Status Viewer, this has now been resolved.
• A fault was found where some customers were having issues deleting employees from the recycle bin. After some investigation it has been discovered to be caused by employees having more than one Holiday Entitlement Note, this has been resolved.
• When creating a new employee record, a fault was found in the Basic details section where the default country shows as ‘Afghanistan’ instead of United Kingdom. The filter was sorting alphabetically and has now been resolved.
• A fault was found in the Employee Badge Preview screen. Badges that had been designed for either contractors or visitor were visible here when they should be filter to only show in the relevant areas. This has been resolved.
• A fault was found where the ‘Left over’ entitlement is not being automatically carried over when the new entitlement year starts, this has now been resolved.
• A fault was found when you had a primary authoriser setup on the employee Self Service Module screen. If you tried to remove one of the request types that they authorise, you couldn’t edit the permissions, you could only delete and then add them back in. This has now been resolved.
• A fault was found where the Daylight saving dates were still using the 2020 dates on a clean database install. This has now been resolved.
• A problem was found with FaceStation customers where they managed to fill up the ‘Operators’ on the Facestation unit. This meant they were unable to set new Administrators and were getting locked out of the device. New options have been added to the Tensor.Suprema DeviceControl app to retrieve and clear Administrators from the units.
• A fault was found with the notification emails that were being sent from Tensor.NET. The standard footer and also any bespoke footer configured in User Options was not displaying correctly. This has now been resolved in this version.
• A fault was found when trying to use the FaceStation combination with Face, Card & PIN, users were being denied access. The fault was found and fixed and users are now able to use this combination.
• A scenario has arisen with the recent enhancements made to the FaceStation with Job Booking options that could affect other devices that are not set to book off job on clock out. If employees scanned out on these devices, the current Job would not end. To resolve this, a new User Option setting ‘Book Off Job on Clock Out’ has been added, this can be found under Processing settings > General. This setting has 3 new options available, ‘Hardware Controlled’, ‘Default Job Only’ and ‘Any Job’ as shown here.

Customer Resolutions & Enhancements

• A fault was reported on the Exception Reasons report. The report was only showing one clock pair when employees had clocked multiple times throughout their shift, this has now been resolved so that all clockings are now show.
• New features for Job Importing – development work has been carried out to automatically import job details into Tensor.NET via an XML file. In addition, the system’s Job Budget report type has been modified to include extra details regarding the time expected to be spent working on imported jobs.
• A fault was reported where the filters on the Misc 1, Misc 2 when used on a report were not working as expected, if you used a ‘LIKE’ filter, this was not finding the results. This has been resolved.
• It was requested that when ‘Un-completing’ parent jobs there is an option to un-complete the child jobs. Previously, you had to manually uncheck the boxes on the child objects. This has now been resolved in this version.
• It was requested that the contact number of visitors & contractors should be displayed on the visitor grid as well as on the appointment calendar. These changes have been made in this version, they can be changed by using the standard field chooser options if required.
• It has been requested to have the ability to have a grand total of hours on the clocking analysis report in Physical Clocking mode, changes have been made to add this functionality in.
• A request was received to add the standard ‘Hide Individual Data’ option to the Employee Job Analysis Report, so that totals only would be displayed. This change has now been made.
• A fault was found in the appointments screen where users were unable to create an appointment using the appointment wizard if your computer is set to English (US). The solution is obviously to ensure your PC/Laptop is set to English (UK), however this has now been resolved.
• A fault was reported when a user is restricted to only view one Employee, the Amend Clockings screen doesn’t get populated unless you have the view by grouping or you right-click on the employee and click “add item to list”, this has now been resolved.
• A fault was reported when creating a Medical record in Employee screen. After adding a record, you were then unable to save. This has now been resolved.
• A new option in auto reports for ‘Next 6 Months’ was requested and has now been added, this allows users to configure an auto report that can produce results for this time period.
• A request was made to be able to re-process past sickness when selecting a company sick pay scheme. On previous versions the Sick pay would only process on the day the employee joined. A new date option has been added to allow the user to set a date as shown.

• A fault was found where the Shift Planner report was not reflecting the changes made in the Roster Offsets options. The issue was found with the report not picking up changes from the day summary header and it was using the rostered shift instead of the actual shift, this has now been resolved .
• A fault was reported where the host and company filters were not working on the visitor/contractor screen. We found the data had stopped being loaded so this was fixed and also, further enhancements have been made:
  1. The searches on both the host and company search are now case insensitive.
  2. The host drop down no longer gets duplicate [None] entries whilst doing a combination of filter and search.
  3. If there is only [None] and one host after a filter then that host will be automatically selected.
  4. When filtering the host and company, the selected item will be unselected (unless it is the only item in the list).
• A scenario has arisen with the recent enhancements made to the FaceStation with Job Booking options that could affect other devices that are not set to book off job on clock out. If employees scanned out on these devices, the current Job would not end. To resolve this, a new User Option setting ‘Book Off Job on Clock Out’ has been added, this can be found under Processing settings > General. This setting has 3 new options available, ‘Hardware Controlled’, ‘Default Job Only’ and ‘Any Job’ as shown here.

• A fault was reported when trying to use the Employee Pay Class Costing Report. The report would normally run fine but when trying to use this as an Auto-Report, it just returned blank data. This has now been resolved.
• A request has been made to add the new functionality to the Bulk Amend screen. Ten ‘Misc Text’ fields held within the employee record can now be ‘Bulk Amended’ as shown below.

• A request has been made to extend the use of the ‘Company Issued Items’ screen. A free text notes field \ box has now been added to the screen and can now be reported upon. This screen allows users to record large pieces of information issued to staff.

Please note that existing users may require an upgrade to a compatible version of SQL Server to utilise this version, please get in touch to confirm your requirements.