Is there a way to "give" earned hours for setup without the operator having to clock in/out of setup?

Epicor ERP 10
1

We have a large amount of assembly operations that have five minute setup times. I would like the operator to receive the earned hours for doing that setup but avoid them having to punch in/out? Any ideas or no way to workaround? Thanks.

2

I do not believe so. One thing you can try is turning on the Auto Complete Setup on Site Configuration. I do not believe it will work, but worth a try.

That field is intended to remove setup load against resources when the operation is marked complete. More of a cleanup utility and I don’t think it will actually assign the hours to an employee.

3

I checked and we do have Auto Complete Setup turned on and it does not do the trick. Thanks.

4

Is the same person completing setup as the person who’s logging into the job?

Why is it important that the operator get credit specifically for setup (other than tracking time spent on the job)?

Is there a different labor rate associated with setup in the resource group?

If it’s the same person and there’s no difference in rate, use auto-complete setup and have them log in as soon as they start setup and stay logged in through production.

If it’s about rate, create an additional backflush operation that calls a different resource group that gets the setup rate. (This won’t result in actual time being collected since it’s backflush.) Have the operator complete setup then log into the operation they will be completing. This will get the cost at the different setup rate on the job.

If it’s a different person, consider the backflush operation route.

Other options - to streamline clocking into the job for a 5-minute operation, consider using barcodes.

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5

We do job adjustments. I believe there is an option to add setup hours to an operation via that BO

6

One thing (when I was a consultant) i would talk about was the amount of time you actually spend collecting data. If you have 5 minute operations, then you maybe should not be collecting actual labor time. Consider this…

  1. assume it takes 1 minute to walk over and clock out of one operation and then into another operation (it actually probably takes more).
  2. If you have 5 minute operation, then the maximum number of jobs you can do in a single day would be 80 jobs (480 minutes / (5min+1Min Setup)) including the clock-in/clock-out time). …
  3. You will be spending 1 hour and 20 minutes just doing non-productive data collection… note that if this more like the realistic 2 minutes to clockin-out, you only get 68 operations done, and you spend 137 minutes logging data.

I had a customer who had this same exactl scenario… we had a long discussion about the no-win situation here.. you spend so much time gathering data, that you actually loose money. It would be better to backflush all the data, and have your people concentrate on getting actual work done.

So… how much is your data worth? I know that you may say “well, not ALL of our ops are only 5 minutes”… but it still begs this question. Data costs money. make sure that you are gathering it and using it correctly.

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7

I think we went maybe a little too far in that direction lol

we have a single backflush operation :laughing:

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8

It’s hard to fathom not getting enough value out of the data collected VIA MES compared to the time it takes to enter it.

9

Most of our product is made in less than an hour. We can just class it as easy, medium, and hard and backflush labor accordingly.

I think if we added a ton of MES stations and automated things it might be less hassle but we haven’t missed it too much over the years so I guess we weren’t getting that much value.

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10

I am not saying “stop all data collection”… more like “Collect data at a level that is valuable”…
WayBack Maching STORY TIME:
I worked at a company that did full 100% data collection of every operation. This was not really a big problem, since we typically had 7 operations per job, and each job took 30 days… so, each person typically had between 1-5 operations per day that they reported. but some reported as high as 20 per day.
THEN i was told to visit our other sites… i flew from Riverside CA to Salt Lake City UT. There we visited two sites. One did 100% collection just like us. the second did “No” data collection at the job/operation level. I asked “How do you know if you are profitable?.. How do you know if your employees are actually working?”… Their answer was very clear.

  1. We count the total number of parts manufactured each day
  2. We count the total number of man hours worked each day
  3. We divide Part count by Hours worked. That gives us the number of parts per hour we made.
  4. We graph that number. if it starts going up… we investigate. If it starts going down, we investigate.
  5. Typically we make 30000 parts per day with 30 people… that is 1000 parts per person. If we look and see the parts dropped to 25000, we look and typically we find that someone was sick, someone went home early, or a machine broke.

So.. in their world, it just didnt make sense to gather data by the job… simply look at the part count. Reward the team for being stable.

I went back home… looked at what we did, and we kept our practice. Why? Well, we also needed the data for our government reporting… part lot tracking, etc. SO… it is not one-size-fits-all… but i did consider it.

End of Story time.

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11

Yeah this way of thinking is quite old school. I would love to compete against companies who only value these 2 pieces of data.

12

You probably don’t have customers faxing you PO’s either :laughing:

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13

I think we might :slight_smile:

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