Advice You - Business

If you run a small business, you probably have a hidden expense that’s eating your time, and your business’s money: Tracking employee time and productivity.

When businesses are small, traditional practice is to use some sort of man

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

ual time keeping system to log employee hours. Each employee fills out a paper time sheet, the payroll administrator goes over the time sheets, cuts the checks, handles the deductions and government paperwork, and deals with reques

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

s for time off, overtime and vacation days.

As businesses grow and add employees, this manual system becomes more and more cumbersome. The steps to automation start out small – an automated punch clock and pre-printed time cards, a

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

nd a rapid switch from manual time keeping to using a spreadsheet.

But even this level of automation requires manual re-keying of data, and as the number of employees grows, the more demanding the needs are for your time and attend

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

nce and payroll systems. A lot of businesses end up “trapped” with a legacy system, usually cobbled together out of several different parts, perhaps even with custom programming in the mix.

Payroll accounting is a repetitive and a

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

gravating task which takes up valuable administrative personnel who could be serving your business in other revenue generating capacities. Even with all the automated steps described above, payroll calculation errors account for ne

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

arly 10 billion dollars in assessed fees and lawsuits annually in the United States alone. Some estimates say that one in four employers make regular and habitual payroll errors, mostly dealing with withholding or insurance deducti

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

ns. Others say this estimate is undercounting the problem, and that as the tax code gets more arcane, it will only get worse.

The single most common cause of payroll errors is, well, human errors. Especially in systems with paper b

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

ased punch clocks or manual time cards, human error (as simple as transposing digits or double entering figures) can be very costly, and cause the need to do adjustment checks or entire correction payroll runs. Most payroll errors

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

re in the range of 1-8%, and even at 1%, when multiplied over several employees, adds up to tens of thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

Human error gets compounded when paper time cards get smudged, coffee gets split on them, emp

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

oyee’s “buddy punch” for each other or they just record their time inaccurately. Couple this with the time spent to verify results, and the time spent doing payroll accounting (an average of 7 minutes per time card per employee), a

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

nd you’ll see that a lot of this could be eliminated if you had an automated time and attendance system with integrated payroll processing functionality.

In addition to paying for itself in saved time and reduced error rates, an au

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

omated time and attendance and payroll system provides your management team with accurate information about which employees are in on time, and how many man hours (and dollars) are being spent on each part of a project, an important

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

part of cost accounting and project management.

Furthermore, if you ever need to run a labor audit, an automated system gives you total hours worked per employee per day on a project, in real time. A fully automated system also h

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

lps prevent “buddy punching” and other tricks that employees can use to cover one another’s tardiness or absenteeism. These systems give you the real time data needed to manage your personnel.

Ultimately, using time and attendance

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

oftware with integrated payroll functionality gives you a streamlined and more efficient set of business practices, which is obviously a benefit to your bottom line. From a manager’s perspective, these software packages allow you t

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

o look at attendance records by employee, money spent by project, as well as other important information about how your operation runs, all from a simple web browser interface.

These systems can even be used to let your employees d

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

“self service” of several routine human resource related tasks – checking their time sheets, getting access to pay stubs, even arranging shift swaps or schedule changes, all from their web browser at home or at work.

Given the cos

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

t of payroll errors, most automated time and attendance and payroll solutions will pay for themselves in under a year by saving time for staff and reducing payroll errors. Indeed,

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

f you assume a business with 20 full time employees averaging 10 dollars an hour – say a retail business - a 1% error rate translates into roughly $6500 dollars a year, which in most cases is much more then the software costs itself

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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