Orange Business Services has commercially launched an NFC-based time and attendance service in France. ‘Mobile et Badge’ offers business customers the ability to track the activity of field service workers such as cleaners, babysitters, security and maintenance staff.

The service uses NFC tags placed at each location that the business wants to track. When a member of staff arrives at one of these locations, they select the ‘I’ve arrived’ option in the time and attendance application stored on their NFC phone. They then simply touch their phone to the location’s NFC tag to send a message confirming that they are now in place.

When the member of staff  has completed their task or meeting, they choose the ‘I’m leaving’ option on their phone’s menu. This then sends a message back to base to inform management that the visit has been completed. As an option, businesses can also require staff to complete a form, also stored in the time and attendance application on the NFC phone, that enables an invoice for the worker’s time to be automatically generated and sent directly to the customer.

The Mobile et Badge application also includes an appointments diary which can be updated by management during the day so that the worker’s schedule can be easily and dynamically changed as circumstances require.

To use the service, businesses need to equip themselves with a Samsung S5230 NFC phone — known in France as the Samsung Player One Cityzi — for each user. They then pay a flat fee for the service of €18 per month on a one year contract or €15 monthly on a two year contract, with 1.5MB of data usage per month included in the price. Customers can also order separately the exact number of NFC tags that they require. These are supplied by Connecthings and are available on the company’s new Ciblespro website.

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