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Work In Progress Shop Status

Wouldn’t it be nice to just look up on a big screen and see the current status of all your work in progress? Sort-of like the airport “Arrivals” and “Departures” screens. Those screens are intended to inform you instantly, and then let you move on. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a screen like that on your manufacturing floor?

Watch the video below for an introduction.

Once you catch the vision for a screen like this, consider downloading Standard Time®. ST has a screen just like that. It has configurable columns to display just the information you’re interested in. Here are some to consider:

  • Job name
  • Started date
  • % Complete and % Status
  • Employee
  • Department
  • Is the timer running for each job?
  • Hours spent so far
  • Cost incurred so far
  • Estimated duration
  • Current status
  • Last activity
  • Programmable key performance indicators

Put the WIP window on a 70″ LCD screen, so it can be viewed from a distance. Now everybody has shop floor status and can see the progress on their relevant work orders.

 

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Project Management for Manufacturing and Engineering

Engineering and manufacturing go together, as shown in the video below. You can’t do the milling and molding without the up-front planning. So what tools do you have for that?

If you want a project management tool for both engineering and manufacturing, consider Standard Time®.

Not only do you get task lists, task planning, project management for the engineering side, you also get the manufacturing execution software for the actual product production and assembly. Design engineers plan their projects, track their time, and complete the product development phases. Manufacturing engineers plan the execution. And finally, operators on the shop floor track the actual hours consumed in each task. Now compare what you’re actually getting on the floor with expectations.

Barcodes and RFID’s collect actual manufacturing hours, which show up on your project planning dashboards. You get instant feedback from the floor.

Call us and ask how it works!

 

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Timesheet Hours in Excel

“You can’t use a timesheet and a spreadsheet together!” That used to be the old saying…

Not anymore. (see video below)

Timesheets and spreadsheets have finally made up. They’re friends again with the new Excel® Add-on named XLST. XLST pulls timesheet data directly from your Standard Time timesheet and puts it into your Excel spreadsheet. This video shows how. Essentially, you’re using Excel formulas to query the ST database, and putting the results into cells. Each cell uses one formula. The results of that formula come from the ST database. You supply parameters for each cell formula, which results in different data for each cell.

For example: Cell A1 might use employee ‘Buzz’ while A2 might use ‘Fred’. Since you’re supplying different data to the same formula, the results will change. That means you can build tables of data in a spreadsheet. Use those cells for pivot tables in Excel.

The data is always hot. You simply open the Excel spreadsheet and the Add-on pulls data in from the Standard Time database.

Go ahead and take a look at the video. It’s pretty nice.

 

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Billing Clients for Work Orders

How are you billing clients for the work orders that pass over your manufacturing floor? In most low-performing companies, it’s a loose informal process. They sort-of know how much time was devoted to each work order, and billing occurs on the sparse information at hand. Maybe that’s a good guess, or maybe the operators on the floor are writing down (most) of their time, or maybe it’s just a flat fee agreed upon earlier. (Check out this YouTube video below.)

That’s the low-performers. How about you?

That’s not you. You are using Standard Time® and pulling actual time records off the shop floor using barcodes. You’re getting exact time and materials. Each time segment is timestamped four times, and contains the employee, job, and task. Each inventory item is also scanned and deducted from inventory, and included on the client invoice. Your invoices are about as precise as they can be. That means you are collecting all the revenue due you.

Serious… it all starts with a simple barcode scanner. Once you start scanning work orders on the shop floor everything changes. Your whole outlook on client billing changes. Your processes change. Your inventory and ordering changes. The progression from low-performer to high is natural and simple.

Get a barcode scanner and change how you bill clients from the shop floor.

This video will get you started.