Troy,
I don't mean to beat a dead horse. You have to do what works for your
company - you guys know what's best. Our employees get two breaks and a
lunch period as well. Again, Vantage accounts for all of this - they only
have to clock in when they get to work and clock out when they leave (2
times). We use bar code scanners (TT5's) that are much cheaper than PC's,
so we can keep them everywhere in the plant and offices. We have a barcode
scanner for every work area (about 1 for every 5 - 8 employees). This
eliminates the long lines and waits.
Your current system works and that makes it a great system. I just wanted
to make sure you were aware of all the possibilities of the Vantage data
collection system. Don't get me wrong, it still has enough weaknesses :)
Chris Gitzlaff
Manager - Information Systems & Technology
Major Industries, Inc.
Phone: 715-842-4616
Fax: 715-848-3336
-----Original Message-----
From: Troy Funte [mailto:
tfunte@...]
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 4:13 PM
To:
vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Vantage] Data Collection/Plant Floor
Hi Chris,
I appreciate your perspective. In our case, going to cell manufacturing
where the cell supervisor is directly connected with his/her cell workers,
this 'nothing' (paper) system is better than the previous (Vantage Data
Collection) by far. The employees just focus on work, the supervisor takes
care of the details. Production is smoother, no complaints of long lines at
the Data Collection PC's at the ends of the day, less wasted time running to
the clock to change jobs. Each cell works on one job per month. Our
philosophy is that the computer system shouldn't dictate the process, it
should be the other way around. We have 160-180 floor employees on two
shifts. The data entry person simply puts in the start/end time (less lunch
and breaks).
160 emplyees x 5 punches per day average (in/out, break1 in/out, break2
in/out, job in/out) = 800 punches per day. @ 30 seconds per punch (walking
to PC, logging in, getting positioned again for next task). 400 minutes
(6.6hrs). x 5 days = 33 hours per week. That is 33 hours from the
production floor directly, almost a full-time person's time. That's a
conservative estimate, I believe. Add the time, overhead, insurance costs
to those 33 hours and you can add up the dollars pretty quick. Our process
engineer did a much more thorough analysis than my math, but the result was
that we changed our processes (and our system) to get maximum production.
We weren't getting the data collection information we wanted anyway, so we
didn't lose anything there. Is it the right thing for every company? No
way. But I say, don't let the system dictate what you do in your company.
Do what works the best for your situation, and adjust your computer system
to fit (if you can). Enough !
philosophy for the day.
Troy Funte
Liberty Electronics
----- Original Message -----
From: Gitzlaff, Christopher
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 4:43 PM
Subject: RE: [Vantage] Data Collection/Plant Floor
Troy,
Data collection has the ability to do automatic lunches. It automatically
deducts the lunch period from the employee's total hours for the day.
They
only punch in to start the day and out at the end of the day. Employees
don't even have to clock out of jobs during lunch. Any job they're
punched
in to has the lunch period subtracted from it as well.
Also, an employees misuse of the system is not a good reason to quit using
the system. Training and strong supervisors should be able to handle
that.
We analyze our job data all of the time. It's never going to be perfect,
but its better than nothing and MUCH better than paper :)
Chris Gitzlaff
Manager - Information Systems & Technology
Major Industries, Inc.
Phone: 715-842-4616
Fax: 715-848-3336
-----Original Message-----
From: Troy Funte [mailto:tfunte@...]
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 3:39 PM
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Vantage] Data Collection/Plant Floor
Paul,
When we did a feasibility study on our data collection practices, we
realized that it was costing us over $200,000 per year (calculating that
each employee had to punch on each job, plus in/out for lunch and in/out
at
each end of the day. The time it took them, multiplied by the fact that
the
employees were still clocking on the wrong job or whatever (inaccurate
data)
led us to go back to a paper system. The supervisor tracks time on paper.
One clerk can enter the whole weeks time entries in about an hour once per
week. We went to data collection originally thinking that we could do all
this ananlysis on the data, but once we did, we found that we couldn't
really trust the numbers anyway.
Just thinking outside the box.
Troy Funte
Liberty Electronics
----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Siebers
To: 'vantage@yahoogroups.com'
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 4:21 PM
Subject: RE: [Vantage] Data Collection/Plant Floor
After I upgraded from 4.0 to 5.1, the number of missed punches doubled.
For
the last year and a half I have been fighting an ongoing battle with
shop
guys blaming their missed punches on Plant Floor not showing their
names,
and HR griping about the shop guys not being able to keep track of
whether
they punched in/out or not. We didn't have problems with people
watching
the clock, although we recently had two employees teaming up and
clocking
each other out (one day one would leave 1/2 hour earlier, and the other
day
they switched it around. Sometimes having that bit of social control
can
be
beneficial.
To our company it is becoming such a big issue that they are seriously
discussing ditching Data Collection altogether in favor of a more visual
type of timeclock system. Fortunately I have been able to talk them out
of
it by reciting all the labor cost collection issues we would have if we
would break labor collection away from Vantage. I am not sure how long
I
can keep apologizing for Vantage type of inadequacies. I feel that more
and
more lately I have been saying "I am sorry, but Vantage won't let you do
that, even though it would make sense to you and me" (sorry for the
general
rant).
In order to better please everyone, wouldn't it be an idea to let system
admins have the option on what to show on the timeclock face? Just a
few
options and check boxes under Menu Maintenance....
PMS
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Useful links for the Yahoo!Groups Vantage Board are: ( Note: You must have
already linked your email address to a yahoo id to enable access. )
(1) To access the Files Section of our Yahoo!Group for Report Builder and
Crystal Reports and other 'goodies', please goto:
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