In the beginning, labor management meant punching into a time clock. A manager crunched the numbers from a timesheet on a calculator, and from there, processed payroll. Which makes it easy to see how the earliest versions of labor management software (LMS)—emerging in the 1980s—seemed revolutionary.
These early versions of LMS still leaned into the time clock, but they also began the first wave of digitation of the process. Managers began replacing paper logs with digital versions, and the wave of improved reporting and tracking was underway.
