For some of you, hours accounting belongs in finance, but here is my situation.

We do bar coding for production. Until now, one machine had a dedicated employee, and this aspect works fine.

Now we are starting to use Combo operations, where the same employee works on two machines concurrently (example, numerically controlled lathes), and that we call combo operations, and it results in saving one salary. We pay a prime for combo work.

The question is, what are the alternative ways to track combo operations?

We are doing its with dual time cards. That is, for that day, the employee clocks in with his time card, and with the combo time card.

At the end of the week, the combo hours are added to his regular hours as a prime. Included in this addition are overtime hours. (Even the combo has overtime paid).

Is there a way to do it that does not require two time cards? We are using Baan's 4C4. We know that the employee can clock in for more than one operation concurrently, and in our plating department, the employees do it.

I was thinking about a ticket concept, where we issue the employee an electronic ticket, and for the balance of his shift, he earns his regular and combo hours bonus. Has anyone implemented this concept?

I am wide open to suggestions.

Leslie Satenstein
Montreal

Hi Leslie -

We have a Time & Attendance solution that sits on top of Baan. We have not implemented this solution, but have tossed around the idea. We already allow them to enter their time as you mentioned into Baan hours accounting, working multi machines. If they are on multiple machines we can split the man hours, but leave the machine hours full. You can do this manually if you are entering the timecards into Hours Accounting. We have a session to generate 'weekly transactions' prior to payroll export, you could create such a session. Here we can fit in a transaction to add 'payroll overhead' record - probably an indirect entry - for the bonus/incentive by examining hours accounting and comparing their man hours vs. the machine hours to get a percentage type of bonus, or however that number is needed.

We want an automated solution. There are 400 employees and while not all of them do combo, there are too many employees to manage manually.

What we did in one plant was to issue two time cards. I was thinking of something like a ticket, good for 4 hours. If the employee works combo, he has 4 hours credited to him, even if he completes the work in two.

If he works 5 hours, and doesn't get an electronic ticket, we have not decided what to do, but probably the last hour will be at combo rate and a half.

Our shifts are 8 or 12 hours, and half day shifts have not been thought about, except for Saturday overtime hours. With combo, half day shifts would be possible.

What is your take on this please.

Leslie

Trying to follow :) I speak hours accounting mostly, not sure how these 'tickets' are translated into payroll, or how your hours get into hours accounting (if you are talking hours accounting at all), and if hours accounting and payroll are supposed to be in sync. Can you briefly describe the full process? Do you have any flexibility there or is a finished system that you have to work with the results of as is...?

In response to the request for more information about our Hours accounting and data collection, here is a brief description.

Our company has six sites, each with a different union contract, or no contract at all.

Essentially, the employees are hired to work on a shift that is in their job description and union agreement They have to clock in for one of three shifts, either 7:30 to 1600, 1600 to midnight or midnight to 7:30. Tolerances are allowed at clock in times and clock out times. In some sites, mealtimes are deducted, in others, depending upon shift, they are not deducted.

The collection system is quite interesting and is based on the contents of the tihra100 table. The hours accounting system has some features, such as ability to bank overtime hours, automatic calculation of compensation for overtime, based on date and time, holidays, and absentisme management, etc.
Driving the entry of data into the hours accounting system is a set of collection tables, completed via barcode scanning. The data in the table is verified against shop orders and indirect activities, is parsed and entered into the system every hour. Eight hours after shift end (to allow for overtime work), data processing to do rounding, and ajustements is done (by shift). We have 36 different shifts at one site. (Consider 3 per day, M-F, Thurs,Fri,Sat, Fri,Sat,Sun, Sat,SUN,MON and you can see how easily it is to achieve 36 shifts).

On a weekly basis, the hours accounting records are processed, according to the union agreements and shift rules. That includes options for banking some overtime, absentism management, etc. One site does payroll every other week.

Back to Combo. Union or employee management agreements at one site allow employees to use a second logon id (and bar code scanning), to record work done. The hours for the second card are processed as a real employee, but the rate is zero dollars. The payroll master is given an email with these employee numbers, to whom they refer to, and hours to provide as a bonus.

At a second site, it is considered part of the job to do combo work. That may change in the near future.

This is my idea, and I am looking for feedback.

At a third site, we want to implement a process whereby we track combo work. In this respect, one thought I had is to use an electronic ticket. The foreman would advise the employee in advance (example, the morning, or the evening before), that the next work period would be a combo one. The employee would be given work for two stations, and he would clock the work, just as he does now, using his one card.

At payroll time, the Baan session that calculates the hours, etc would also use the "electronic ticket" to generate a bonus record for combo work. This bonus record would probably be in multiples of 4 hours.

Our actual financial management of payroll (income tax, other deductions,etc) is handled by an outside firm. We use Baan to generate the appropriate data and a sequential file is prepared and transmitted.

My question is, "Is there a better way, yet unexplored to handle combo work?"

I see, thanks for the background, it sounds like you already have some time & attendance functionality outside of Baan Hours Accounting then..? You are calling something 'hours accounting' that is not Baan Hours Accounting... Are there other users of that system that you can talk it out with or is it an in house solution..?

The ticket concept is new to me. Do they record their hours straight or do they stop and start jobs? In our system they can start and stop multiple overlapping jobs with 1 login, and that would be the basis of our solution. If you can only talk to the payroll based on their labor entries, it seems like the ticket's are not a bad way to do this, but I am not familiar with your system.

The ticket idea (electronic) is something I thought about. It is not in production, but I thought of it and it is being explored.

Why ticket. Well, suppose I have an employee work combo on the AM, but not in the afternoon. How do I track that? Does he get a separate bar code number to scan? (scan in and scan out?). What if we use two time cards, and because of the work, he is either not available, and someone else has to do combo in his place, or we need two individuals to share work in a third area. Do we have to generate a second time card for everyone involved with combo?

My idea is the electronic ticket. To make it simple for the foreman, it would be good for 4 hours max. The foreman can issue more than 1 ticket to an individual at a time, to run consecutively. Thus, should the employee leave early for dentist, etc. a relief person could take over. What is the cost? Well it would be the bonus for the hours worked, as the ticket is an upper bound bonus value on hours worked that day. If the employee leaves early, his bonus cannot exceed hours worked. Oh yes, we would pay 1.5x or 2x time for overtime on the bonus.

There is a third approach to recording combo. We could use the honor system, and allow the employe to scan combo work start, and combo work stop times, with a final validation the following day by the foreman. That places a fairly heavy burden on the foreman to validate the combo claims. The ticket issue concept, in my view, gets around that.

Leslie

If you are not already verifying the start and stops, you are right I would not add to that burden just to cover this issue. One thing we have done in the past, not specifically for this, but as you mentioned you are using a ddc system, we have a transaction called 'supervisor override' where the supervisor can simply scan in their badge, the employee badge and, in our case the indirect task they are allowed to put time against, given a 3 hour window. Is that basically what you mean by the electronic ticket - a way to allow the combo entries by the employee? That sounds like a good way to verify up front the start and stops of combos, with an upper limit as you want, and you can reduce the burden at the end of the day for the supervisors..

I think it's all fine, of course, whatever works for you guys. Are you trying to eliminate the second time card for everyone? Because to me that seems like the only drawback, and even there, whatever work for you because you need to report the hours however gets them right...

I wish there was concensus amongst my peers and thus I would have an easy reply. One site wants to remain silent, since the union has not asked for combo bonuses to be paid, and bonus avoidance lowers production costs.

Another of our sites has issued two time cards to the employees. One for regular work and the other for combo. One of my predecessors decided that when an employee works multiple machines, that the elapsed time should be distributed against the machine hours. I think this is wrong. We should have the machine hours as actual, so we know machine utilisation. On the otherhand, we need a separate method to derive actual costs (elapsed time / # machines). This is a discussion that I will bring up. I have more things to iron out. And I will have to write a proposal about my findings.

With the two card idea, we have to insure that the second card hours does not exceed the first. Also, if we cut the meal (unpaid lunch hr), on the primary, we should do it on the secondary as well.

I am looking for a way to automate combo tracking. The two time card approach leads to an uncomfortable, but simple (and possibly error prone) way to manage combo work.

Thank you all for your feedback. I await more ideas, and if I have questions, please let me post them here as a follow up. I am not giving up, until I find the solution that works for us. I want to thank my Baanboard peers for all the discussions thus far.

Leslie

OK, Here is what I found for combo operation. My ticket idea will identify employees who do combo.

Since the employee will be working combo, all combo work will terminate at the end of shift clockout. We will look at the employées hours during the day, by work centre, and look for the overlaps. Overlaps will only be calculated singularly for hours accounting.
Other mechanical adjustements, such as determining which is the combo (2nd or other work centres hours are determined by machine, but bypassed this way for employee hours).

Hours work will be based on minutes to minus minutes from.