One of the biggest challenges we find with any customer is the lack of 100% visibility into how employees spend their time in distribution and manufacturing operations. Within distribution, most WMS systems only track on standard work, ie direct labor. Anywhere from 25-50% of labor then is unaccounted for. With manufacturing, it can be even worse because most MRP/MES systems only track product and not employees so actual on process visibility per employee is not there.
Job Coding is an effective way to track all of this unaccounted for labor. What is job coding? Job Coding is just an employee time tracking system that allows employees to sign into work processes and track volumes for work that is not tracked by other systems. Often companies can use their current time and attendance systems to do this, but it requires that the job code functionality be licensed and additional clocks placed throughout the facility.
There are also job code specific products available such as PocketPayroll by T3 Technologies and Easy Metrics own product, Job Trak. These systems are designed with usability and speed in mind. One of the challenges we see with traditional time clock systems is the time it takes for an employee to clock in and assign themselves to a job code.
For example, imagine a packing line with 20 employees on it and they all need to sign into a new job code. The typical time clock system we see takes about 30 seconds per employee to login and change their job code. That is a lot of downtime for each job code change on the line.
Modern job coding systems take only a few seconds for employees to clock in and out of processes. Alternately, supervisors can clock in and clock out entire work teams.
In today’s world of high pressure distribution, every second counts. Modern job coding systems take this into consideration and minimize the amount of time users spend tracking themselves. As well, these systems are web based and can be deployed on off the shelf hardware that is far less expensive than proprietary time and attendance systems.
If you desire to know where 100% of your employee time and cost is being spent, we highly recommend implementing job coding in your operation.
