Let us say that your company has a production line style operation where it would be inefficient for operators to leave the line to clock onto and off of jobs.  Managers would like to use labor collection to analyze efficiency and profitability, but there are enough jobs that the time spent clocking on and off of each would kill efficiency and be cost prohibitive.  It is not worth the effort.   At first you thought Epicor could handle some type of “crew punching” where a team leader could clock onto a job and automatically his crew would be clocked on at the same time, but you found that this is not the case.

In an attempt to overcome this challenge, we have spent some time devising a method whereby a company can get some of the same efficiency reporting and we think we have an answer.  For the first part of our solution, here is the strategy:

• First, create several new “indirect” labor codes, but assign the type “Direct Labor.”  These codes correspond to common operations (e.g. package for shipping).
• Line employees will clock onto the appropriate “indirect” labor code and select the production line as their resource.  They will stay clocked onto this indirect activity all day.
• The line leader will clock onto each job as it is loaded onto the line, and clock off of each job as it is unloaded from the line.

With these labor transactions, we can now get an overall efficiency report by selecting a reporting period and then adding together all of the direct labor (including “indirect” and direct to job transactions) and dividing by the total estimated hours for operations completed.  This is a fairly straightforward report.  We can also break down this efficiency report by resource group because each job operation and each “indirect” labor transaction is assigned to a resource group.  These reports comprise stage 1 of our crew punching solution.

It turns out that we can also break down these transactions by job, but that report will be more complex, so we have saved it for stage 2.  Stay tuned.