Manufacturing Productivity, ERP & The Shop Floor GUI Timeclock
When it comes to the direct- versus in-direct costs associated with manufacturing labor, the question must always be asked, “Who’s in the plant, and what’re they doing?”. That is to say, when it comes to questions concerning the valuable, yet limited, resource of time, the tracking of personnel and their activities through any part of the day is absolutely necessary to eliminate waste, enhance productivity, and increase the bottom-line.
In the past, the accounting of personnel time was simply a matter of marking time-in and time-out as indicated on a manually punched timecard. The “in-between” time of an employee was lost to managers and only measured by the amount of finished goods delivered at the end of the day. That it took a shop floor machine operator a half an hour to search for a tool before returning to the pending job on his machine was shrugged off as unreportable data.
With trending in manufacturing toward totally integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), software technology advancements have now evolved to the point where employee time and attendance is measured in terms of value-added direct cost or non-value added in-direct cost. Today, shop floor personnel keep highly accurate accounting of their time via a computer-based, virtual timekeeping workstation where labor time and attendance is tracked and recorded according to labor type: direct, indirect, overtime, and so forth.
With a simple visual display, the user friendly Graphical User Interface (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, a GUI in tandem with sophisticated manufacturing software is able to maintain an ongoing, real-time evaluation of productivity and plant work capability.
In addition to its many other functions, in terms of labor direct costs, the GUI is a “timeclock” in the traditional accounting sense. Employees simply clock into and out of work directly at an online workstation terminal. This labor tracking data then becomes part of an entire set of measures of time and attendance associated with any particular employee. Once clocked in, employees can sign onto jobs through the GUI and add this information to any cumulative employee work history maintained by HR.
The work history data often includes listings of all of the jobs worked on by the employee (or in process), the start date/time, the end date/time, the hours worked on the job, and an indication whether or not the job is closed. Here, the GUI display can also be easily manipulated for listing any specified date range, and it indicates a total of hours worked by that employee during that range. When these direct labor time measures for a specific employee are compared with the employee’s product output for any desired date range, a more advanced GUI system can even calculate efficiency ratings for that employee. A related benefit is that when payroll is integrated with a GUI timeclock system, there is more reliability in HR functions and a better accounting with the general ledger of the company.
Again, the goal of ERP management is to integrate all functions of shop system flow and to make the most of the resources at hand—especially the resource of time. Regarding the human element of plant operations, to know who is the plant at any one moment, and what it is they are doing in those moments, is vital to truly assess productivity. With the development of the GUI time clock system as part and parcel of a sophisticated manufacturing software program, managers now have such tracking capability and are given the tools they need to make the personnel and production adjustments to fine tune ERP and reduce the actual cost of goods sold.