Executive Summary
When a Fortune 100 data company noticed an overall drop in productivity and widespread violations of their hybrid work policies, they needed more than gut instinct to understand what was happening. After a failed attempt to build an internal monitoring platform, the company selected Teramind and worked with its Professional Services team to build a custom geolocation and attendance reporting solution — integrating badge swipe data, PTO logs, employee calendars, and travel records into a single pane of glass. Within weeks of rollout, the company uncovered hundreds of absent-without-leave (AWOL) violations in a single week, identified employees doing little to no work while remote, and discovered individuals who had left town for weeks without taking PTO or performing any work. The company is now expanding into Teramind’s data loss prevention capabilities.
Customer Profile
- Industry: Data / Technology (Fortune 100)
- Work Model: Hybrid (in-office, remote, and hybrid teams across multiple global locations)
- Primary Objective: Centralize location and productivity data to compare remote vs. in-office performance and enforce attendance policies
The Challenge: No Way to Know Who’s Working Where
The company had rolled out a hybrid work model and invested heavily in improving physical office spaces, expecting employees to maintain scheduled in-office days. The problem was that many employees who were expected to be in the office simply didn’t show — and compliance was nearly impossible to monitor at scale due to the various legitimate exceptions like PTO, sick days, and work-related travel.
Making matters worse, reports surfaced of employees swiping their badges at the office door to register as present, only to turn around and leave without telling anyone.
The company’s goals were clear: centralize employee location and productivity data in a single view, confirm attendance for scheduled in-office days, compare in-office performance with out-of-office performance, and provide easy-to-read reports for nontechnical executives — all while filtering reporting by leadership level using Active Directory roles and protecting sensitive HR data on a secure platform.
But the technical complexity was significant. The company operated across numerous global office locations with in-office, remote, and hybrid teams. VPNs could obscure employee locations. And the various internal systems employees used to track their own attendance and travel were completely disconnected, making data reconciliation a massive challenge.
Build vs. Buy: Why an Internal Solution Failed
Initially, the company wanted to keep everything in-house. Their extensive IT teams attempted to build a custom internal platform that would correlate data from multiple applications. The result was an application that took too long to manage, lacked activity data, was riddled with bugs, and couldn’t correlate or visualize information in any meaningful way. The big-picture visualizations leadership needed never materialized, and the project was scrapped after consuming too many internal resources.
The decision was made to find the most powerful, stable, and secure existing platform available — one with adaptable settings and integration capabilities that could meet their complex requirements.
Why Teramind Won the Evaluation
The IT team launched a full vendor review, collected bids, and ran their top three platforms side-by-side. Teramind stood out as the most mature, customizable, well-supported, and secure option for several reasons:
- SaaS Maturity: Founded in 2014 with over 10,000 customers, Teramind offered proven granular behavioral data collection and business intelligence reporting — not a gamble on a newcomer.
- Reliability: 99.98% uptime and availability rates, redundant architecture, and geographic hosting options around the globe.
- Enterprise Security: Teramind was the only provider whose security program included ongoing code reviews, frequent penetration testing, secure architecture, role-based access control, and the compliance documentation enterprise companies require from their partners.
- Integration Capabilities: The ability to pull in data from external systems — Active Directory, badge swipe platforms, HR tools, and travel and expense systems — and centralize it within Teramind’s reporting.
- Enterprise Support: Dedicated SLAs, public cloud and on-premise deployment options, and a deep bench of expert support.
The Solution: A Custom Multi-Tiered Location Reporting System
Teramind’s Professional Services team worked hand-in-hand with the company’s IT team to build a custom solution from the ground up. While one Teramind group developed integrations, normalized disparate datasets, and mapped fields to import external data, another team enhanced the platform’s existing geolocation capabilities — resulting in entirely new features and visualizations tailored to the client’s exact needs.
The solution integrated data from five external systems: Active Directory for employee, team, and manager alignment; security badge swipe data from two separate platforms; the HR platform for PTO and sick day tracking; Datawatch security badge swipe data; and the company’s travel and expense platform.
With all data feeding into Teramind, the company gained a multi-layered approach to location reporting. A geolocation map widget showed where each employee worked each day. Detailed heat map tooltips provided context including in-office network connections and keycard swipes. And all of this was cross-referenced with employee calendars, PTO records, and approved travel dates for final validation — all visible in a single pane of glass.
What They Found
The company rolled out Teramind to an initial group of employees and immediately saw clear attendance policy violations and trends. When the full rollup report came in, the results confirmed leadership’s growing concerns — and then some.
In just one week, the report revealed hundreds of AWOL violations concentrated on particular teams, with several office locations showing much higher rates of absenteeism than others. Individuals with the highest AWOL rates were selected for deeper investigations, and the findings were cross-referenced against Microsoft Teams calendars and behavioral data for accuracy.
The investigations uncovered that many employees were doing little to no work while at home, raising concerns that some might be working other jobs while on the clock. Others simply weren’t following company attendance policies. A smaller subset of employees had left town entirely for weeks at a time — without taking PTO, checking in with their managers, or performing any work. The company was able to address these instances immediately, driving impact within weeks of rollout.
What’s Next: Expanding into Data Loss Prevention
Having achieved their initial goals rapidly, company leaders are now expanding their Teramind deployment into data loss prevention. The IT team is building out prebuilt rules for protected data and templated behavioral alerts to prevent costly data leaks. They plan to leverage screen recording for all risky users, as well as optical character recognition (OCR) for detecting when sensitive data is displayed on screen. Combined with automated response and alerting capabilities, this will allow the company to perform investigations, collect irrefutable evidence, and even halt processes in real time based on the severity of a security violation.
The Verdict
This case study demonstrates what happens when a Fortune 100 company stops guessing about workforce productivity and starts measuring it. By centralizing behavioral data, geolocation, badge swipes, PTO logs, calendars, and travel records into Teramind’s single pane of glass, the company gained the objective, granular visibility it needed — not only to enforce hybrid work policies, but to uncover systemic problems that had gone undetected. What started as a productivity question became a foundation for enterprise-wide behavioral intelligence and data protection.
