Title: UNES Hebat as a Cloud-Native GPS Attendance Platform and Institutional Innovation in Indonesian Higher Education
Authors: Irfan Ananda Ismailą, Sufyarma Marsidin, Dewirman Prima Putra, and Muhammad Takdir
Volume: 10
Issue: 7
Pages: 169-183
Publication Date: 2026/07/28
Abstract:
The digitization of administrative processes in higher education institutions represents one of the most consequential and least studied arenas of organizational innovation in the developing world. Attendance management, in particular, sits at the intersection of personnel governance, payroll integrity, and accreditation compliance, yet a substantial share of Indonesian universities continues to rely on paper-based registers that are vulnerable to proxy signing, backdating, and record loss. This paper presents UNES Hebat, a cloud-native GPS attendance system designed, deployed, and operated at Universitas Ekasakti (UNES) in Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia. The system integrates GPS geofencing, real-time photo verification, server-side temporal validation through a database stored procedure, and a zero-hardware deployment model built on managed cloud infrastructure. Launched in January 2026 and operated continuously for 181 days, the system processed 29,251 attendance records from 288 registered users, achieving a 99.92% present-status rate and zero reported availability incidents across 4,344 cumulative server-hours. In July 2026, the system was extended to support 849 student participants of the university's community service orientation program, absorbing a nineteen-fold surge in active devices over five consecutive days without infrastructure reconfiguration. The paper provides a complete architectural description, a formal account of the server-side validation mechanism, empirical operational performance data, and a documented analysis of the July scaling event, offering a reproducible institutional innovation model for GPS attendance digitization in resource-constrained higher education settings.