SmartBarrel is the ultimate construction workforce management solution. Solar powered, self connected and loaded with the latest computer vision technologies, it’s able to manage labor workforces from anywhere. SmartBarrel was founded by Albert Bou Fadel, a glazing (glass) project manager with years of experience in construction.
The concept sprouted from being tired and exhausted from the agonizing weekly payroll process that required a lot of paper time sheet processing, data entry and significant amounts of guess work to make sure workers got their pay on time. Not only was the process incredibly outdated, it was also clear that the existing systems did little to combat fraud, it depended on an honor system that many workers found ways to abuse, rendering the work site an uneven playing field, which upset and demoralized team members.
Albert started by procuring commercially available technology solutions with the thought that “there must be something out there to help with these pain points! It must exist!” – He started by deploying a smartphone application. This sounded great, every worker could report his or her hours, it was Geofenced using the phones GPS to make sure the worker was onsite and much more. The major problem was that many workers didn’t own smartphones, or simply refused to accept a tracking application on their personal phones. Within the first few weeks the list of excuses for not clocking in grew, ranging from worries about privacy all the way to the classic “My battery is dead” up until the trigger was pulled and time keeping went back to the good old paper time sheet.
After months of extensive research another breakthrough tool came in the form of keyfobs/tags. Workers could simply tap a device with the tag to clock into the site and tap it again to clock out. This solution seemed to work well since it mitigated the barrage of excuses generated by using a smartphone app and it seemed workers were diligently clocking in using the tags. Upon further review of the newly implemented solution it was noticed that within 3 weeks of deployment, a worker was discovered clocking out 25 teammates tags, highlighting the ‘Buddy Punch” phenomenon.
This is when Albert decided that commercially available products weren’t good enough and he would make one that was. SmartBarrel was born as a facial verification device that was able to eliminate 100% of all excuses against adoption while taking into consideration all the challenges that a construction environment has to offer such as ruggedness, weather exposure, lack of power and lack of connectivity.
The SmartBarrel device is a stand alone, self sustaining panel with an extremely simple clock in and clock out process powered by the latest computer vision and machine learning technologies and it vows to revolutionize the way timekeeping is kept, shared and processed.
SmartBarrel’s services begin at the jobsite where it accurately collects workers data daily, digested in the cloud for time and other requirements and then is seamlessly processed by payroll software. SmartBarrel not only helps to eliminate timekeeping fraud at close to 100%, it also helps streamline and consolidate the entire labor workforce payroll process with a simple click.
