Here’s a snapshot of Dan the consultant’s day. Checking employee progress. Checking project status, and tasks. Clients, customers, and vendors. And logging his own time on projects he’s managing and working on. As consultants, that’s what we do.
Consultants use Standard TimeĀ® Everyday
But Dan has a secret weapon: ST. It does a lot of the things we all used to do manually. Consider these possibilities for your own consultancy.
Checking timesheets and sending email notifications
Checking for upcoming or overdue tasks
Watching for too many hours on critical tasks
Accruing PTO and comp time
Sending email notifications when projects are approaching the end
Looking into the future for project revenue predictions
Project management charts, like triangles and analytics
Syncing with Android and iOS devices
These are just some of the things ST does automatically. They are things we used to do manually. But now there’s time for more important things.
Choose View, Project Resource Allocation to see an employee availability graph.
Get the Right Employee for Your Project
Actually, the availability graph is just the inverse of the allocation graph. In other words, when an employee is dedicated to certain projects and tasks, they are not available. So it’s the opposite.
How do you get the graph to work? Just assign users to projects and/or tasks. That’s it. The graph automatically works. It either takes a percentage of a person’s daily schedule for a project, or it takes the duration of the tasks their assigned to. Either one. But that’s all you have to do to make it work.
Here’s a new inventory management idea for your manufacturing shop! Combine the automation of barcodes and scripts. Try these steps in Standard Time® • Scan your Bill of Materials to deduct every item from inventory • When inventory drops, items are automatically reordered • Now scan them as they arrive at the back door • Inventory levels spring back like magic!
If youāre barcoding both time and materials for manufacturing, take a look at this video.
Automate the Shop Floor
Youāre going to see how you can track both time and expenses with a barcode scanner. First youāll scan the project and task to start the timer. Next, you can scan expense templates that represent the materials or supplies being consumed on the job.
Expense templates are used to represent all the fields you want per-populated in each expense record. They have a name you can scan. That names shows up in the timesheet, with the quantities next to it. Just scan once for each item being consumed. The quantity will update each time. Then look in the Expenses tab to see all the records you are accumulating.
Scroll down for the video.
Now that you have both time and expenses for the manufacturing process, you know exactly:
Here’s a quick overview of the timekeeping apps for smartphones.
Road Warriors! Track Time on the Road
Mike goes through each of the buttons on the main page. Both iOS and Android apps have the same time tracking functionality. You can start a timer, or just enter complete time log records. Expenses, mileage, and vehicles can also be tracked.
Search for “Scoutwest” on the app stores to find them. Or use these links:
You probably know that Standard Time is a time tracking application and you can barcode projects, tasks, work orders on the shop floor. Did you also know that you can barcode inventory and bill of materials and deduct from quantity in stock? Let’s take a look at how it works.
Let’s start by going into tools, inventory and bill of materials to see what you can scan to automatically deduct from inventory. It turns out that all of these inventory items are scannable. The names you see over here on the right hand side can be set up on barcode labels. You can scan them to automatically deduct from inventory. Same is true with the bill of materials; if you were to scan panel assembly that would deduct all of the items from inventory in this entire bill of materials.
Let’s switch over to Microsoft Word where we can actually see the labels that would be printed out and scanned on the shop floor. We’ve got a simple name of bill of materials, you recognize the panel assembly. I’m going to remove this front, go back to a normal text font, you can see there is real no magic here.
You’ve got the asterisk before and after which is normally necessary for most barcodes. In this case we have an equal’s character to substitute for the space. This is the name of the bill of materials that we saw over at Standard Time or an inventory item. Here we’re actually adding 100 of these items back into inventory. Adding 200 panel assemblies and down here we’re subtracting 5 of these in 7 panel assemblies. You can add and subtract using this special notation with the dashes and quantity. Let’s undo you can see then the normal font that we would use for printing out barcode labels. Print those out and scan those on the shop floor or the receiving dock.
Back to Standard Time, we’ll go back into tools, inventory. It turns out you can scan more than just the name. You may remember that pn1 from the barcode label. Turns out you can scan the name or the SKU or a code or a part number. You can scan the vendor SKU or the manufacturer SKU. If you already have these barcodes printed on boxes, coming in off the receiving dock, you can then scan those put them back into inventory. And that would affect the quantity in stock whether we’re subtracting or adding.
When the quantity in stock drops below the reorder quantity this will kick off a script to automatically reorder those items; or replenish if you’re building them in-house. Now that’s a topic of another video but that is a way to automatically reorder or replenish those items.
When we’re in the bill of materials you’ll notice bill of materials do not have quantities. Instead each of the items in the bill of materials has a quantity. In this case we have two wood panels, 24 nuts, 35 screws and 12 weldment assemblies. When you scan the panel assembly bill of materials you’re actually deducting all of these items in this quantity from inventory. Go ahead and set up your barcodes and begin scanning inventory items in addition to the time tracking that you get in Standard Time.
HR managers will like this. ST automatically computes PTO and other time off hours. It’s a vacation tracker. Plus more.
Everyone Loves a Vacation
You just set the number of hours to earn, and the earn period. Choices are weekly, monthly semi-monthly, or yearly. That’s it. Nothing else to do. Just sit back and watch new PTO hours accrue as the weeks go on.
Employees will submit time off requests for vacation, sick, personal or other reasons. HR approves. Hours are subtracted. And new ones are added in the coming weeks. It’s all automatic. Give it a try.
Ray White's Blogsite 