Consider allowing Standard Time to manage your job management. You’ll spend less time communicating job status, figuring out where jobs are, and who’s working on them.
Try ST in the cloud!
Employee Timesheets
A timesheet so easy your cat can use it!
All your projects are listed — ONLY your projects.
All your tasks are listed — again ONLY your tasks.
All you have to do is fill in your hours. But don’t let your cat do it. You’re boss can tell the difference! 🙂
Engineers Track Employee Progress
Manufacturing engineers use barcodes and dashboards to track employee hours, jobs, status, customer orders. Watch this little video for inspiration. 🙂
Engineers Follow Projects
Manufacturing and design engineers are some of the primary users of Standard Time®. Hopefully, this little video will help inspire you to give it a try. Download a trial once you’ve had a look. And let us know your thoughts. We’d like to hear from you.
Assembly Line Work Order Tracking
How do your manufacturing managers know which orders are running on which assembly lines? Got software for that? Yeah? Then you’re good to go!
Software to track orders in manufacturing is called an MRP. What’s an MRP?
An MRP is a manufacturing resource planner. It is used to plan and schedule resources like assembly lines, equipment, materials, and even human resources. I.e. employees.
Standard Time® is an MRP. It tracks projects and orders on assembly lines. Or, if you don’t have assembly lines it tracks orders through your manufacturing facility. Find out where each order is, what status it is in right now, and how much work is left to go.
Watch the video and then give it a try.
Key Performance Indicators in Mfg
Manufacturing Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are custom calculations that are meaningful to your organization, and signify a position of success. In other words, when you view the results of your calculations, you’re looking for results that tell you you have either failed or succeeded.
Example: Avg Work Order hours: 38
Failed: Above 40
Success: Below 35
In this example, you’re somewhere in between failure and success. You are averaging 38 hours to build the average work order. Anything above 40 hours (in this example) is unsustainable. Anything below 35 hours is great! But in all likeliness, you may have a few bad samples that are skewing the results. So, you’re probably good. But still, it’s time to dig in and find out what’s going on. Which projects are taking so much time? Which employees had a hard time completing the jobs? What circumstances led to the “above 35” results? Maybe it’s an anomaly, or maybe it’s real. You won’t know until you dig into the actual time logs to find out.
Microsoft® Excel® is a good tool to calculate manufacturing KPI’s. You can bring your time tracking data in from Standard Time® and compute the exact success/fail scenarios that are meaningful to you.
It turns out that you can also use scripting in Standard Time to compute KPI’s to be displayed on the Work In Progress screen. (That’s a big display that shows the status of every project on the shop floor.) You custom KPI computations will display next to each job on the big WIP screen. You’ll be able to look up on the big screen and see if you’re achieving success on each job.
The video below describes the basics of manufacturing key performance indicators. Watch it for inspiration and a starting point. The next step might be to download Standard Time, and get started. And then we’ll help you get where you want to be.
Talk to you after the video!
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.
Work order and shop floor status
Need up-to-the-minute status on all your projects, jobs, and work orders? What if you had a screen like those airport departure and arrival screens that showed your jobs?
That would be cool!
Well, here it is. This screen updates every 15 seconds, and displays the current status of all your jobs that have activity in the last thirty days. You see who performed the work, when it was performed, and the current status of each job.
Let’s say you’ve got a crew out in the field with Android’s. They are syncing time and materials used on the job. Those synchronizations could occur any time. So, this screen updates constantly, every fifteen seconds to show the latest status.
Or, let’s say you have a shop floor with barcode scanners and RFID. Workers are constantly scanning and entering time and materials used on the shop floor. This airport screen shows the status of every work order on the shop floor.
Or, let’s say you have an engineering shop with engineers entering hours against projects. Want the latest status? You get the idea. This screen does it.
Take a look at the video and let us know what you think!
Track Time for Engineering Projects
Engineers undertake the biggest projects in modern times. Don’t be caught using a spreadsheet keeping track of your time. Sure, spreadsheets are nice; they calculate and organize every kind of engineering data imaginable. But we have to draw the line when it comes to entering engineering hours against project. They just don’t work. Here’s why:
- When you track engineering time in a spreadsheet, it’s usually only one person. That person becomes a bottleneck. They get weary of the job and make mistakes. There are time tracking apps for this work, which decentralize and collect time where and when it actually occurs. That makes the hours more accurate and more granular
- When that one person enters employ hours, they have to find a spot to put them. If there isn’t an appropriate task for the work, they make things up. Why not let the actual employees create their own tasks and enter the correct hours for them. Making stuff up never helped anyone.
- Spreadsheets have some pretty cool graphs. But they can’t run complex routines that build the kinds of graphs you need in engineering project management. Instead, you just get summations and statistics. Those are helpful, but maybe not exactly what you’re looking for.
Engineering Directors Dream
Don’t wake me up I’m having a great dream! All the engineers are getting Standard Time®.
See the dream below………
That’s an awesome dream for the engineering director. She’s getting a timesheet on every desk to track engineering hours. She can use that to compare actuals with estimates. That alone is valuable because project schedules without actuals are not so great schedules (real actuals, coming from real employees, that is). Forget about copying down what somebody said they worked, and typing them into the ‘Actual work’ field. That’s almost as bad as no actuals at all.
But in this awesome dream, the engineering director sees employees closing out tasks they’re finished with. It’s hard to say just how great that little advantage is. That small thing informs project managers that tasks can be set aside and not worried about anymore. Communication in any form is wonderful. But this really helps the PM keep track of stuff.
Here’s the cool thing about this director’s dream: It goes beyond just the engineering team. You have PTO and vacation tracking for the HR folks. And you’ve got reporting for the executives. Hey, that’s sounding an awful lot like an enterprise project timesheet.
Tell us your dream!