For multi shift factories, managing working hours across different shifts can quickly become a manual task for HR. This case study looks at how a manufacturing plant in Vietnam with 50–200 employees moved its shift planning and attendance totals from Excel into a system, reducing the need to manually filter and consolidate working hours.
WHAT MAKES FACTORY ATTENDANCE HEAVY | MANY SHIFTS, rotating by week and by team |
These three multiply rather than add, so the HR workload grows fast |
| INDUSTRY | Manufacturing |
| HEADCOUNT | 50 to 200 employees |
| SERVICE | terra HR System |
| CHALLENGE | Shift planning and attendance |
The client is a manufacturing plant with a large headcount running several shifts. Before terra, all work schedules and attendance totals were managed manually in Excel. Every cycle, HR filtered the clock data by hand to produce each person’s working hours, which is both slow and draining when headcount and shift count are high. terra moved schedule and attendance management onto terra HR System with flexible shift planning, work schedules set up around how the plant actually runs, and camera based clocking. After the switch, the system produces working hours on its own and HR no longer filters data by hand. |
Background
In manufacturing, attendance is not a standalone problem. It sits at the end of a chain that starts with shift planning. A plant assigns shifts by team, by line and sometimes by week before there is any basis for saying whether someone arrived on time. When that whole chain lives in Excel, a small change at the start ripples all the way to the timesheet at the end of the cycle.
That was the situation here. Schedules and attendance were both handled manually, and with a large headcount across several shifts, the end of cycle consolidation became the heaviest task the HR team carried.
Why factory attendance is heavier than office attendance
Many companies think attendance is just recording arrival and departure. That holds for an office on standard hours. It does not hold for a multi shift plant, and this is where manual handling starts to break.
MỘT CA HÀNH CHÍNH One schedule for everyone | Compare clock records against a single shift |
| Total the hours at cycle end |
The schedule barely changes, so this cycle looks like the last one and a single formula covers everyone. |
| | NHÀ MÁY NHIỀU CA Four things must be right before you get an hours figure | Assign shifts by team and by week |
| Handle swaps, night shifts and days off |
| Match clock data to each person’s correct shift |
| Total regular hours and overtime |
Schedules change by week and by person |
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| A different schedule per person, per week No single template covers the spreadsheet, because one person’s shifts this week differ from next week. |
| An error in shift planning corrupts everything after it If the shift record is wrong, every clock comparison after it returns a wrong result that is very hard to spot. |
| Every manual filter is a chance to get it wrong HR filters the data by hand to produce working hours, and because that step repeats every cycle, so does the risk. |
| Scale multiplies the exposure The number of rows is headcount times shifts, so more people and more shifts raise the workload by multiplication. |
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The part that gets overlooked: the heavy work is not data entry, it is interpretation. The device only records timestamps. Mapping those timestamps to the right shift for the right person and concluding how many hours were worked is what HR has to do itself. |
How terra approached it
Because the problem starts with shift planning, the solution had to start there too, not just replace the clocking device. terra implemented three parts together on terra HR System.
Flexible shift planning Shifts assigned the way the plant actually runs, rather than forcing the plant onto a preset shift template. |
| | Work schedule setup Schedules are declared in the system, so when a shift changes the hours calculation follows automatically. |
| | Camera based clocking Camera capture suits the factory floor, where a lot of people arrive and leave at the same moment at shift change. |
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What matters here is that the three parts connect. Shift schedules, clock data and the resulting working hours live in one system, so the export to Excel and the manual filtering in between disappear.
Before and after
Before terra | Schedules and attendance managed in Excel |
| HR filtered data by hand to produce hours |
| Every shift change meant rechecking by hand |
| Workload grew with headcount and shift count |
| The result depended on who prepared the timesheet |
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| | After moving to the system | Shifts and attendance live in terra HR System |
| The system produces working hours on its own |
| A shift change updates the hours calculation |
| Adding people or shifts does not add proportional work |
| HR reviews and approves instead of processing data |
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The biggest change is not speed, it is that the nature of the HR job changed. They used to produce the hours figure. Now they check the figure the system produces. That is also why attendance management became much faster after the switch.
Where a factory rollout usually fails
In a plant, the end users of an attendance system are workers on the floor, not office staff, and the switch happens while the line keeps running. That makes rollout and on site support just as decisive as the technology.
Client feedback centred on the implementation support team, described as committed and genuinely helpful. This is reported from the client feedback and is not a verbatim quote. |
That is worth noting for any company selecting an HR system: most of the risk in a factory attendance project sits not in the feature list but in whether someone walks with you through the first few cycles.
If your plant still runs shifts in Excel
Five questions to ask any vendor during the demo, before price comes up.
| Shift planning Can the system plan shifts by team, by line and by week, or does it only assign one fixed shift per person |
| Mid cycle changes When a shift or a person changes mid cycle, does the hours calculation update itself or need manual fixing |
| Night shifts and overtime How are overnight shifts and overtime calculated, and can they be separated for review |
| Clocking method Does the capture method suit the floor, when hundreds of people arrive at once at shift change |
| Payroll handover Do approved working hours flow straight into payroll, or need manual export and import |
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Facing the same problem in your plant terra implements shift planning, work schedules and attendance for manufacturers in Vietnam, and connects attendance data directly to payroll. |
