A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
This is the best advice we’ve seen in a long time! Save your overtime pay and buy out your own company!
Hey… if they’re willing to pay overtime instead of deploying shop floor barcoding then they’re fair game for a hostile employee take-over!
Get ’em while they’re hot!
Use the techniques in this video to automatically add new projects and tasks at the moment employees scan them. This eliminates the admin burden of adding them beforehand.
Managers and supervisors must add new projects and tasks before employees can scan them.
Create a barcode rule to automatically add them at the moment they are scanned.
Consider using scheduling software to maximize use-time, but at the same time meeting customer delivery time.
This little video may help inspire you to try Standard Time® job management software. Feed jobs into one end, and get scheduled tasks that correspond to machine availability. Standard Time looks for empty slots and fills them with prioritized job tasks. That sounds like fun! 🙂
Consider these three blokes the foremost experts in manufacturing technology. They share their wisdom from time to time, and we’re lucky to have them here today. Hey, you have to give them credit for imagination and ambition!
Excel makes a nice analysis tool. Try these steps to get more from your shop-floor barcode scans. In just a few clicks, you’ll get some valuable intel you can use to improve manufacturing processes.
Tracking work order time is the first way to improve them. If you can learn how much time goes into each operation of a job you can use that to eek out small percentages of improvement. Or, in some cases completely alter your processes. Sometimes small “bugs” in operational processes are actually just tips of the iceberg. That’s why work order tracking has value.
Consider this little video an inspiration to try the Standard Time® tracking capabilities. You might find something worth correcting. 🙂
Get started with Time Off accruals in Standard Time. After all, it’s more than just scanning barcodes on the shop floor. It’s also employee maintenance and management, which includes PTO requests and time off accruals.
Set all the policies for hourly time off accruals, then let them run automatically. Hours will accrue day-by-day, week-by-week, or month-by-month. Then they will be deducted as employees request time off. Easy!
Allow this “short” to inspire you. Then give it a try yourself!
How do you get shop floor job status now? Don’t say, “We just yell across the shop floor over the noise of grinders, CNC’s, plasma, benders, and exhaust fans“. Cuz that’s not an answer, dude.
I need help! Everyone could use an assistant these days. Have you considered software assistance? Standard Time is just the tool for manufacturing. It tracks job status and employee time so you don’t have to. That’s the very definition of assistance. Watch the video below, and then try it out.
Watch how we use these two Chromebooks to track manufacturing products with RFID tags. Just scan once and you get a timestamped record of the location of your job.
Consider using sticky-label RFID tags on all your boxes, inventory, products, and jobs so they can be tracked through the shop. You’ll know when, where, and who scanned.