E-V-E-R-Y-B-O-D-Y at my company hates time cards. For years we have said we will do away with them. You know where this is going.
Every day employees still fill out paper time cards riddled with errors or are indecipherable. The next day, another employee enters all of that info - hundreds of rows - into a spreadsheet and uploads it via DMT, which itself is a bad idea per everyone on this forum. It’s horrible, but that’s what we do.
But this is the year we change!
So, any suggestions on what to do next? FYI - we do not do payroll through Epicor. So this is purely to cost the jobs.
Have every employee do it themselves in Epicor (in MES)?
Have managers/supervisors do it for them, one by one, job by job, in Time and Expense?
My favorite: don’t even try! Just completely guess at how many hours it took to build something. I bet it would be at least as accurate!
Something else?
I’ll say I can’t see #1 happening. Too many employees on too many jobs. We’d either need more kiosks/tablets, or there would be quite a line at the end of the day.
Everyone hourly, clocks in at an MES station or their desktop (Office MES or Clock In screen). We have a BAQ written to adjust and verify times. We then have another one that formats the data for iSolved where they then process our payroll. Lots of customization, to our time tracking, but we have 0 desire to process payroll, deal with benefits, and tax so the payroll features seemed extra
our hourly team clocks in with biometrics, but of course that’s only enough for indirect labour.
For direct, we did a. mod to roll up all the subassemblies into a. single scan and sign-on at the start and end of each job. Then, we track overall utilization as a % of hours paid vs. hours on jobs, and initiate projects to improve that number. Was about 60% at go-live, about 85% now. Not an exact science but easy to mine the data (biometric scanners are on a MySQL DB) and easy to explain to. c-suite.
Do you have any kind of a budget? If so the Mobile App (the new one)is quite nice
That failing MES for each would be my choice just install a few work-stations.
@jgiese.wci Do they clock to jobs? The MES interface for this seems just awful. So many steps and if they clock to different operations, that seems painful.
@SteveFossey So for your implementation, there are never multiple operations with time on them - they only clock to a single operation on any given job? Well, that does make a ton of sense. Hmm.
Huh. Did not realize EMW did time and expense. But the people that would use EMW are indirect and the people that do time cards are not material handlers, so that seems like a waste. I sure did forget about the T&E app, though.
Two of my clients: All employees log in and out of Job’s by scanning the Job Traveler into MES via Start Activity/End Activity
One of my clients are now paperless (no Job Travelers) and use the Work Queue in MES to see what Jobs they need to do and select a Job/Opr row and select Start Activity and then End activity when they are done and enter the qty.
One of my clients want to move to EMW for Labor entry.
Another option that some of my clients use for SOME parts is Kanban Receipt, all labor is per estimate and all materials backflush.
@jgiese.wci Amazing, of course. I recall you saying before that your shop floor is not SSO, and I imagine this is part of the reason. So, the employees still need to log out every few minutes to let the next person log in? I guess there’s no way around that if you have each employee log their time.
@Rick_Bird I appreciate the range of implementations.
We don’t track labor, so you can stop reading right here if you want.
But while investigating it we came up with many questions that might be good for you to think about.
Even if you don’t use Epicor for payroll processing, are these time sheets used by whoever does your payroll? More or less to determine total hours for the day (Last Entry Ended - First Entry Started)
Do you need just the direct labor? Would indirect labor be valuable to?
If your indirectly labor is minimal (but no ones really is), could you accept it being added to the last operation the employee “started”, until the next “started” operation. This does away with clocking out out of a job.
Just trying to raise the right questions before trying to determine the best solution.
edit
The first company I worked at (circa 1991) had a single “clock-in” station light pen barcode reader. There were books with the various things to scan (employee ID, Operation, WO num). All of this was fed back into their PICK based MRP system running on a microcomputer, with terminals. Workers would scan every time they changed what they were doing. No need to clockout, as scanning the next function would do that. “Material Handling” was the most used indirect labor code. As that was what folks would punch in as when finnied one job and not sure what they were working on next.
We made the same switch from manual entry time cards to your #1 about 6 months ago, employees clocking in and out, and on jobs, through MES terminals which consist of a raspberry pi booting in Kiosk Mode to MES through EWA.
Using Pi’s kept the cost low so we could have about 1 terminal per 6 employees, and we do not really see any lines throughout the day or shift start/stop.
We made our line supervisors responsible for correcting any issues that come up, forgetting to clock out or on jobs, etc., through Time And Expense.
Most of our employees are on one job for several hours. Our machine operators are the opposite, producing several parts per minute usually. Those employees clock in and out through MES and use Kanban Receipt for their productive time.
For MES we buy refurbished 4th or 5th generation i5 Lenovo M73 mini desktops with an SSD and 8GB of RAM. They cost me like 160 bucks each… (240?? hell I dont remember. Still cheap as heck). I can get you the name of the company that we buy from if you want. My sales guy is pretty good about getting me what I need pretty quickly. We basically shotguned MES stations up for the factory floor so that we did not have to be concerned about the punch in rotation dance.
We started where you were when I first joined the company 20 years ago and not only payroll, but quality data was entered after the fact, so we would know next week we were having issues with quality or productivity last week.
We progressed thru having group leaders do a single entry on a job with a guess of hours to now we have an mes system for most stations with a traveler that has all of the operations barcoded with everything they need to drive MES without a keyboard. They login by a common team login and use their employee id for MES.
We collect quality data on End Activity and have two hour stats available to group leaders. They next want those posted on monitors every two hours for everyone on the floor to see.
We don’t use Epicor payroll, but I send every clock in/out start and end activity to our timeclock system, so we can split payroll a bunch of ways for analysis.
With each progression of data gathering we have made quality and productivity gains.
I really appreciate everyone’s input on this. This is excellent.
@ckrusen No, it’s quite the opposite; we validate the time cards by the punch clock, not the other way. We do care about indirect, but I think people are quite willing to sacrifice it just to eliminate the paper. Adding the indirect to a single job/op is not a good solution to me (though I guarantee it happens everyday now without consent); I think the idea would be just to distribute it evenly through the worker’s day. Ha, yes, indirect is not near as minimal as it should be.
@jgiese.wci and @Joseph_Martin and @EarlGrei I suppose I am cheaper than my company is, and we probably do need more kiosks. I am not a hardware person, but I bet the other IT people here would salivate at the chance to build some Raspberry Pi devices.
@gpayne Interesting that you ended up with MES after all. I was not expecting that. But I am glad to know it works well.
10000% that. You’d think its gonna work great. And for a time it does. And its not aweful. Then stuff goes wonky plus it ends up costing more than you think. BLEH just give me a refurb.
