Standard costing is really a ‘best guess’ at labor costing -- these numbers are often inaccurate, incomplete or out of date.

Accurate job costing requires the capture of all tasks associated with a specific product or job, including direct and indirect labor in setup, production, and customer service.

Inaccuracies in the collection of time allocated to machinery and the use of materials can result in the inability to properly pass those charges through to the customer, reducing company profitability.

Basically, you can’t manage what you can’t measure -- and you can’t measure what you can’t track. So the inability to track time-to task ultimately inhibits maximum utilization of the workforce. Unproductive activities remain hidden from sight -- managers don’t have the information needed to understand where wasted time exists, and therefore cannot create an action plan to remove it.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

• Sit down with your IT team. Decide how the information will be captured and where it will be stored so that employees have access to it. What software tools need to be used to capture the information? How does it need to be organized? Create a repeatable process to make this easy for your staff.
   
• Interview the person. Have them talk you through his/her job. What are the things they do every day? What are their biggest challenges? How do they overcome them? 
   
• Have someone shadow the person for a week. Watch what they do and how they do it. Ask questions. Who does he/she interact with in their department? Outside of their department? Why?
   
• Find out what tools he/she uses to perform their job? Are there spreadsheets?  Reports within your ERP / outside of your ERP? Separate stand-alone databases? Drawings? Websites? Why does he/she use them?
   
• Video record how the person does their job. Is their technique critical to “doing it right” the first time and not ending up with a bunch of scrap that you can’t reuse?
   
• Figure out if the person does anything special on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis that might not come up during the observation period or interview. 
   
• Map how he/she uses your business system and how that impacts the rest of the company. Understand both the “what” and the “why”. Without this, new employees may end up figuring out what they need to do, but never understand why they need to do it.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

A serialized item is a physical occurrence of a standard item that is given a unique lifetime serial number. This enables tracking of the individual item throughout its lifetime, for example, through the design, production, testing, installation, and maintenance phases. A serialized item can consist of other serialized components.

In Service, a serialized item can be a customer-specific or owner-specific installation. Installation groups are a group of installations/serialized items such as photocopiers, computers, air conditioners, forklifts, lathe machines, and even aircraft.

A serialized item is identified by both the item code and serial number. You can set up the mask used to generate the serial numbers so the serial number includes some fields of the item data, such as the item group and the manufacturer.

In a multi-company structure, the companies can share the serialized item data. All the service departments in the various companies can refer to the same serialized items.

The serialized item can originate from a sales order or a project. The details of a serialized item indicate their origin, for example, by using specific sets of serial numbers for items that originate from sales orders and from projects. Serialized items can also originate from an as-built structure or directly from the production bill of material in Manufacturing.

In Service...

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