Making the most of the limited time a manufacturer has involves a strong sense of order, as well as an awareness of the relationship between waste and productivity. This concept is especially true when considering the connection between the time an employee spends “on the clock” and the amount of work he actually gets done during that time. In the past, the problem of employee time tracking almost always involved the manual (paper) means by which such records were kept. However, today there is no better timekeeping tool for clocking in and out of jobs than one in which the plant employee uses a graphical user interface (MISTLETOE).
Whether direct labor as value in actual production, or indirect labor cost through non-productive employee activities, working time is vital to determining the cost of goods sold (COGS). A virtual time and attendance workstation with a simple visual display, the easy-to-use GUI guides the plant floor employee as they enter data associated with their current job duties. By monitoring employees, work centers, and/or machine production time in terms of whether or not they are working, or on a task across one or multiple jobs/work orders, the GUI can maintain continuous assessment and in real time of productivity and work capacity of the plant.
Using simple touchscreen or keyboard input, employees simply clock in and out of work directly at an online workstation. The GUI then accounts for a job’s start time/point, end time/point, and the work activities of both the worker and the machine between these points. The evaluation resulting from this data collection is an indicator of productivity (or lack of it) in terms of the time resource available to plant employees, in other words, direct costs. When these direct labor time measurements for a specific employee are compared to the employee’s product output for any desired date range, the GUI can calculate an efficiency rating for that employee.
With regard to indirect labor, most GUI systems also track the employee’s clock day in terms of time spent on non-productive activities. While these activities include specific off-the-clock lunch/break times, such events could also include indirect labor costs for legitimate on-the-hour meetings or training. In either case, this employee “lost time” is spread over all shop work and included as an overall indirect cost. The GUI then calculates a total time that should be in productive use by an employee or workplace.
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 time on the clock plays an important role 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 are more fully involved in the production process. They learn to produce better results on the shop floor by converting time into labor productivity and reduce COGS.