Manual attendance may seem like a simple HR task, but at scale, it can become a serious operational bottleneck. Long queues, delayed shift starts, manual errors, and proxy attendance can turn a few seconds per employee into hours of lost productive time. It has a significant hidden cost for the business.
And there is another problem:
Marking attendance does not necessarily mean the employee is actually present.
An employee can mark attendance for a colleague who is not on the premises, then return later to mark out. The attendance record may look complete, while the actual workforce presence tells a very different story.
A company with 13,000 employees approached us with two major challenges:
- Reducing the time spent marking attendance
- Ensuring attendance records accurately reflected who was actually present
At the start of a shift, even a simple attendance process can create a significant bottleneck.
On average, one employee took around 10–15 seconds to mark attendance. That may sound insignificant, but when thousands of employees arrive around the same time, those seconds quickly add up.
The result?
Long queues. Delayed shift starts. Lost productive time. Money lost.
The company had already deployed 12 attendance machines, yet the long queues and time spent on attendance remained.
The Bigger Loophole: Proxy Attendance
Time was not the only issue.
There was also the problem of proxy attendance.
An employee could mark attendance for another worker who was not actually on the premises. Later, the employee could return and mark out, leaving behind an attendance record that did not accurately represent actual presence.
For a workforce of this size, even a relatively small amount of attendance leakage can become expensive.
For example, if just 30 minimum-wage workers were consistently creating this type of attendance leakage, the estimated impact could reach approximately PKR 1.5 million per month.
And that is only the direct cost.
The business may also face additional costs from:
- Time spent by HR and supervisors verifying attendance
- Resources spent managing attendance discrepancies
- Additional workers needed to cover unexpected absences
- Productivity losses when employees are not actually present
- Operational delays caused by insufficient workforce availability
The problem was no longer simply:
“How do we record attendance?”
It became:
“How do we know who is actually present?”
The AI ON EDGE Solution
AI ON EDGE approached the problem differently.
Instead of asking thousands of employees to manually record their attendance, we used the company's existing CCTV infrastructure to automate the process.
CCTV-Based Automatic Attendance Monitoring
As employees enter a designated area, AI ON EDGE automatically detects and records their entry.
- No queues.
- No manual punching.
- No additional action from the employee.
When employees leave, their exit can also be recorded automatically with the corresponding time.
Built for High-Volume Workforce Environments
Unlike traditional attendance machines that process employees one at a time, AI ON EDGE can mark the attendance of up to 5 persons in a single second.
This means that when several employees enter an area together, the system can detect and process them at the same time rather than making each person wait for their turn.
This helps remove the attendance bottleneck created when thousands of employees depend on a limited number of physical attendance machines.
Closing the Proxy Attendance Gap
With AI ON EDGE, employees no longer need to manually mark their attendance. The system automatically records attendance when the employee is detected entering or leaving the monitored area.
This helps prevent proxy attendance, where one employee marks attendance for another who is not actually present.
Can It Be Bypassed With a Picture?
No, A picture or video cannot mark attendance.
While a video might fool a basic motion detector, AI ON EDGE tracks real movement across multiple frames. Our spatial geometry and perspective tracking distinguish natural walking paths from flat, planar playback surfaces like a phone or tablet screen.
From Attendance Records to Workforce Visibility
This is where AI ON EDGE goes beyond traditional attendance machines.
Traditional attendance systems primarily answer:
AI ON EDGE helps answer:
This creates a stronger connection between management records and ground reality.
Attendance becomes more than a record in a system. It becomes a source of real-time workforce visibility.
No New Infrastructure. No Major Overhaul.
The company did not need to replace its entire CCTV setup.
AI ON EDGE is designed as a plug-and-play edge AI solution that can work with existing compatible CCTV infrastructure.
The compact device requires only around 20 watts of power, while AI processing and data remain local reducing dependence on cloud infrastructure and external data transfer.
Your cameras are already watching.
AI ON EDGE makes them intelligent.
Ready to Automate Attendance?
Stop spending valuable time managing attendance queues and manually verifying workforce presence.
Let AI ON EDGE turn your existing CCTV infrastructure into an intelligent, automated attendance system.
Contact us: info@aionedge.ai