GUI Time Clock and Its Importance in Monitoring Direct Labor Costs
Getting the most out of what limited time a manufacturer has involves a strong sense of orderliness, as well as an awareness of the relationship of waste to productivity. This concept is especially true when considering the connection between the time an employee spends “on the clock”, and how much work he or she actually gets done during that time.
In the past, the problem of tracking employee time almost always involved the manual (paper-based) means by which such records were kept. However, today there is no better timekeeping tool for clocking on and off jobs than one in which the shop floor employee uses a Graphical User Interface (GUI).
Whether direct labor as value in actual production, or indirect labor cost through non-productive activities of employees, labor time is vital for the determination of the cost of goods sold (COGS). A virtual time and attendance workstation with a simple visual display, the user friendly GUI guides the shop floor employee when they input data associated with their ongoing job functions.
By monitoring employees, work centers, and/or machine production time in terms of being either on or off the clock, or at task on one or multiple jobs/work orders, the GUI is able to maintain an ongoing, real-time evaluation of productivity and plant work capability.
Using either a simple touch-screen or keyed input, employees simply clock into and out of work directly at an on-line workstation. The GUI then accounts for the starting time/point of a job, the ending time/point, and the labor activities of both worker and machine in between these points.
The resulting evaluation of this data collection is a gauge of productivity (or lack of it) as it relates to the time resource available to the shop floor employees—in other words, direct costs. When these direct labor time measures for a specific employee are compared with the employee’s product output for any desired date range, an efficiency rating can be calculated by the GUI for that employee.
Regarding indirect labor, most GUI systems also track the employee clock day in terms of the time spent in non-productive activities. While these activities include specified off-the-clock break/lunch times, such events could also include indirect labor costs for legitimate on-the-clock meetings or training. In either case, this “missing time” for employees is distributed among all shop work and included as general indirect overhead cost. The GUI then calculates a total time that should be in productive use by an employee or work center.
Ultimately, employees come to recognize the important connection between time and productivity. With their documented work history as an indicator of productivity, employees see that their on-the-clock time plays an important function in the operation of the plant as a whole.
Through this recognition, the GUI becomes an enterprise resource planning (or ERP) application in which employees more fully involve themselves in the production process. They learn how to produce better shop floor output through the conversion of time to job productivity, and reduce the COGS.