Darchem Engineering go live!

Darchem Engineering, part of the US based Esterline group of Companies, is an industry innovator in solving high-temperature and thermal engineering challenges for the world’s leading aerospace and defence companies, have awarded the contract to activHR Consulting to provide an integrated workforce management, access control and payroll solution.

The focus for this exciting project was to provide significant efficiency gains in the targeted areas of both time & attendance and payroll processing.

The system now operates over two UK sites and will be delivering the operational excellence envisaged when the project began last year when it goes live at the beginning of the new tax year.

Nick Pye MD of activHR Consulting commented, “Our time & attendance software, working in conjunction with our data collection devices, helps organisations control labour costs, manage compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity; the capturing of employee data is the starting point in controlling costs. Darchem’s problems weren’t untypical, in that a huge amount of time was being devoted each month to manually calculate what was to be deemed to be paid time and that the resources applied to this activity could be redeployed elsewhere."

He continued, "The administrative burden created by the working time regulations dictated that we needed to supply and configure a system that would make it easy to collect employee working time data, analyse records and to highlight breaches or potential breaches of legislation. Some complex requirements were catered for regarding Darchem’s specific and historic rules and parameters governing working time, which has further enhanced the efficiency gains being realised.”

In addition to using standard ‘off-the-shelf’ products, some bespoke development by activHR Consulting was necessary to bring about one of the biggest operational changes, whereby all attended hours were automatically brought across from the T&A system directly into payroll, ensuring that the data used for processing payroll was accurate. The numerous hours previously spent each month checking  and correcting 100’s of manual clock cards, plus the huge amount of time spent each month on rekeying data into two separate systems will be removed and with data being automatically delivered to the payroll system.

The payroll system, IRIS Earnie IQ, was needed to process large number of employees quickly and securely. Its SQL database means it can be seamlessly linked with our SQL time & attendance product and reports can be produced in great detail.The summarised benefits are:

• A reduced administration burden
• Data entered once and used to populate other systems – no re-keying of data
• Simplified payroll and employee record administration
• Payroll accuracy
• Effective holiday planning
• Improved absence management
• Control of Flexible Working arrangements
• Conformance to Working Time Regulations

Please contact us for more information and to discuss your individual requirements on 0844 335 8486 or to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it