We’re looking for some insight. We’re in the process of implementing Kinetic and we’re looking for some advice.
The system we’re moving away from allows us to enter labor hours and machine hours separate for each operation. This is beneficial from the quoting side so we can get a more accurate view of what our costs should be to run the job. In looking at Kinetic there is only a production rate available which would assume all of our jobs will have the same number of labor hours as machine hours.
We’re curious if any other companies deal with shared labor and how you account for it, specifically on the quoting side? We’ve attempted a couple of different work arounds, but unfortunately can’t find anything that will work. Before we approach the topic of customizations, we thought we’d reach out to the community.
Alex – thanks for the quick response. Did you customization to split hours cover the quoting side as well as the production side? If yes, can you please advise what method your teams used to take time on jobs?
Perhaps you can setup employees as resource groups and let them start activity as ‘labor’ or ‘machine’. Then just ignore the actual labor aspect of everything.
If I am understanding correctly, you want to capture Machine hours and Labor hours. I have not tested this process but you can give it a try. I’m not aware how to capture the hours separately in one operation but what if you set it up in two different operations which are run concurrently. The Machine operation could be clocked onto with a hypothetical employee with an hourly rate equal to your machine rate for the duration of the operation. The Labor operation is then clocked on and off appropriately by the employee to record their time. The result would be X hours for the Machine and Y for the Labor.
Bruce, yes this is exactly what we’re looking to accomplish. We have thrown around what you have suggested, but the idea of having two operations (labor and machine) for every process seems like a lot to us, but if the labor split is that valuable, maybe it’s worth evaluating again. I’m going to bring this back up to my team as a potential option.