majority of engineers still schedule
manually using spreadsheets and
do not schedule well at all.
My short hand advice to owners,
production managers and
management teams of engineering
firms that I consult to is six fold;
1 Stop using spreadsheets to
schedule work. Spreadsheets
are very time consuming, job
status must be assessed and
recorded manually then entered
by staff or management manually,
and in most case sequencing of
tasks and capacity of tasks is not
considered so the forward work
schedule is not accurate
2 Invest in tablets for your factory
floor and labour management
and scheduling software to track
daily and weekly downtime and
manufacturing time
3 Use only scheduling software that
where jobs and tasks are updated
live from factory floor tablets and
where individual staff register task
started and task finished in real
time
4 Use only scheduling software
developed solely for engineering
and other custom one off
manufacturing businesses
5 Four minimum requirements
of scheduling software; task/
process capacity reporting, Job
list viewable on calender, drag and
drop of Tasks and Jobs on the
calender and Gantt charts
6 Factory floor Job and Task status
is ideally viewed live on 50 inch
TV monitors on the factory walls
and office walls for all factory
staff, administration staff and
management to see continuously
throughout the day
I use ‘Empower Factory Productivity
and Scheduling Software’
developed here in Auckland, NZ
WARWICK RUSSELL, OWNER
OF SMETRIC INSIGHTS
Smetric Insights helps make driving
business performance easy. Our
focus is on developing software
and interfaces that enable custom
reporting for Engineers, custom
product Manufacturers and other
businesses. We provide owners
and management teams with
tailored, high-quality reporting
which includes accurate figures that
provide greater visibility of work in
progress, job and task requirements,
scheduling, true manufacturing time
and true labour costs.
I have also owned two engineering
businesses with over 100 staff. So,
I know and fully appreciate all of
the challenges around scheduling
to meet changes in customer
demands with quantities, timing and
variations. Then there are all the
challenges to manage breakdowns,
unexpected downtime and jobs
taking longer than expected.
Historically, in an attempt to try
and schedule jobs, the Engineers
used manual job cards on planning
boards and Excel spread sheets.
These were all a bit of a nightmare
with different versions of the truth,
no good visibility across the shop
on where things were at and the
challenges of rescheduling the jobs
manually on the board.
To work out job times and job costs,
at the end of the working day, the
Engineers used to have factory staff
fill in manual job sheets with their
job start time, job end time and job
duration time that they “guessed”.
We then had administration staff
re-enter those job times into our
job cost system. This was a poor
system and poor reporting; times
on jobs were recorded highly
inaccurately, the information was
too late for management to do
anything with, not good for basing
future quotations on and they did
not make factory staff accountable
to their job times.
Software such as Empower Factory
Productivity & Scheduling is a
game changer for engineers. By
using touch screens or tablets on
the workshop floor jobs, factory
staff and time on jobs are tracked
in real time and there is visibility
across the entire business; where
teams and individual factory staff
are at, where jobs are at, where the
capacity constraints are and what
conversations are needed with
clients on priorities ahead of time,
not after a late delivery.
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PO Box 23293 Auckland
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www.filtercorp.co.nz 0800 481 9999
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