Has anybody got experience of using PDA's or mobile scanners to caprture hours of employees and feed it into Hours accounting?

can anyone share some info on this?

Hi -
My company does consulting in that area - RMCis. We provide shop floor solutions using our DDC Middleware that communicates between scanners/other hardware and Baan DDC transaction handling, and our enhanced hours accounting function servers to update Baan real time.

On scanner side, generally our functions runs on anything with a TE Emulator or that runs Windows CE (most flavors), even old PC's. That will cover most PDA's and Scanners, including the more robust shop floor scanner hardware and time punch equipment like those from Intermec.

Not sure where you're questions are. You can run emulators to just pull up Baan sessions as well, if you are looking for less expensive route (though that eats up licenses). You can go the BOI / OpenWorld route, program yourself or get a vendor in for consulting. Other companies provide the similar solutions and in many different ways, you may get more suggestions.

Hello Kinley,

Yes there definitelya re solutions for this question. In fact similar questions have come up before and were solved in several ways (very much like the solutions proposed by RMCis.

Check out our website for contact details, or use the email-link located there and I will contact you shortly. It'll take 5 minutes of your time, and this 10-year-ex-Baan guy will explain all you need to know to consider the (many) options you have to choose from.


Kind Regards,
NextStep Practical Logistics Strategies

http://www.nxtstp.nl
www.nxtstp.nl (http://www.nxtstp.nl)

We're on 5c. & I am reviewing the possibility of implementing Hours Accounting.

The problem is that we have one person working on a bank of 3 to 4 machines simultaneously throughout the shift. Therefore, we'll have to report on multiple production orders during the same time frame. If we do this, the hours are added together. In essence, Baan is showing 24 or 32 hours worked instead of just 8 hours.

When I close the production orders, I see a huge variance for estimated vs. actual hours. Not only will this create a problem for cost accounting, but we would eventually like to use the data from hours accounting for downloading into our payroll system.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

That's the way standard Hrs. Accounting works, you have to divide up that time manually. This is one of many reasons that several 3rd party add ons for hrs. accounting / time and attendance are out there.

The RMCtime solution will properly allow several orders to be open at once, and divide the man hours accordingly when entering into HRA. Machine hours are not divided. So, for example:

Order / Operation: 1 / 10 From 10:00 to 12:00
Order / Operation 2 / 10 From 10:00 to 12:00

Each job would get 1 Man Hour and 2 Machine Hours. This is a very simple example, our system handles partial overlapping and some priority setups. It can support up to 50+ jobs open at once.

I am not sure what other 3rd party systems offer for that. I do know that this problem is one of the original reasons our system was created. The interface to payroll (ASCII file export) is also part of our system.

Hi all,

I am just programming some Baan-sessions that we run on a PDA using Citrix.

My experience is, that it is almost impossible to work with standard forms:
for example, a standard button fills almost half of the available screen width.

I now use the low-level way to design forms that Baan offers (see create.object in the Tools help). Here you have much more possibilities to create a form in the way you want it (size of buttons, fonts, position of screens etc.)

Cheers,
Frank

Has anybody got experience of using PDA's or mobile scanners to caprture hours of employees and feed it into Hours accounting?

can anyone share some info on this?

You don't mention whether this hours accounting information is to be input via real-time connection or batch mode. You mention using a PDA, most of which are not RF enabled without add-ons.

Have a look at www.arcgateway.com (http://www.arcgateway.com) they have been providing Baan RF barcoding solutions for a number of years now. Hours accounting functions are provided off-the-shelf.

Recently they have extended their offering to include batch entry from non-RF handheld devices, for use in areas where RF is not available/too expensive to cover or offsite. In your example, if the data doesn't have to be uploaded to Baan immediately, you could gather data in numerous PDAs and sync them at the end of the day.