Our AS/400 system recorded overtime to the minute. The replacement preserved paper-era rounding that could erase the first twenty-nine minutes of real work.
The AS/400 attendance system recorded overtime in one-minute units. There was no technical reason to round real work into fifteen- or thirty-minute blocks.
The parent-company operation had a different legacy. Its explanation treated 0–29 minutes as zero, 30–44 minutes as thirty, and 45–59 minutes as forty-five. The issue was not the phrase “fifteen-minute units”; it was that actual working time could be recorded as less than the person worked.
A paper office may once have needed coarse units to make monthly arithmetic possible. Excel, macros, and certainly AS/400 can calculate each minute without difficulty.
In the systems department, a manager who understood attendance rules sometimes had to adjust a twenty-five-minute case past thirty minutes so the employee would not receive zero. That kind of balancing act should never be pushed onto the workplace.
Digital transformation should remove the inconvenience of paper, not reproduce it electronically.
CHAPTER 03 · PART 05 · EPISODE 2 / 3 STORIES · 35 STORIES TOTAL