When schedulers and planners are trying to determine which laborers can be assigned to work orders in Maximo, there are two critical factors that must be considered. First, the scheduler needs to determine which laborers are qualified to perform each work order. Second, the scheduler needs to determine which laborer are available to perform the required work. Using solutions from WorkTech, both of these data points can be easily maintained and updated into Maximo.
First, WorkTech features a robust labor qualifications manager that incorporates some of the most important elements of qualifications management. Managers can update the qualifications that laborers have, and can set expiration dates for each of those qualifications so that they can be assured that work will not be performed by unqualified labor. Each of these tasks can be done in Maximo as well. However, WorkTech takes it one step further. WorkTech has a series of automated messages that can be sent to the laborer, supervisor, and manager well in advance of the qualification expiring. That can help to ensure that the expiring qualification is caught before it actually occurs. By notifying laborers, supervisors, and managers that qualifications are going to expire, corrective action can take place.
Second, WorkTech provides a robust leave management system, including employee requests and a supervisor approval queue. Employees submit requests for time off, the requests are validated against the employee's accrued leave balances, managers can analyze the employee request compared with general staff availability, and then approve the request. Once approved, the employee availability is updated in Staff Manager so that schedulers and planners automatically know that the employee is not available to work that day.
The solution set from WorkTech provides schedulers and planners with the tools they need to determine whether employees are able to work on particular work orders. These tools are comprehensive, fast, and easy to use. Contact WorkTech today to see a product demonstration for your organization.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) is under the direction of Under Secretary of Defense. Its responsibility is to provide contract audits for the Defense Department, and prevent any inefficient or fraudulent practice made by government contractors. There are currently 4,000 auditors working for the DCAA. In simple words, the DCAA wants to know whether government contractors are making every dollar spent by government count.
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The DCAA reviews organizations’ Accounting and Financial Reporting System, all related documents and records.
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The Federal government has established various rules and regulations regarding to contactors’ work hours and costs. The Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) specify, "Before agreeing on a contract type other than firm-fixed-price, the contracting officer shall ensure that the contractor’s accounting system will permit timely development of all necessary cost data in the form required by the proposed contract type." Thus, the first thing auditors would review is contractors’ accounting policy and procedure manual, to see if they meet government regulations and rules. Organizations need a seasoned expert to make the policies and prepare required documents.
The DCAA also checks how contractors record employees' work time and project cost. A key thing auditors need to do is identifying every cost: which cost is reasonable, which is not. According to government rules, there are different types of cost. First step is determining whether it is a direct cost or indirect cost. A direct cost is a cost specific to the performance of only one contract; an indirect cost is one which benefits more than one contract. An example of an indirect cost would be buying a new truck, which would not only serve one project, but potentially all the of the contractor's contracts. The next step is determining if the cost is reasonable and allowable. The basic standard of reasonability is to see if the “costs would be incurred by a prudent person in the conduct of competitive business.” “Allowability” refers to the costs which are “reasonable, allocable, complies with Cost Accounting Standards.”
The three basics costs that are examined include labor, equipment, and tools. Timekeeping and Contractor Cost Tracking Software can help organizations prevent unnecessary costs. For example, the software can be used on a daily basis to record employees’ work time. If an employee bought an tools or equipment, proper steps would need to be made to account for these expenses. By doing this, the contractor tracking system can make sure there is no inefficient or fraudulent with the organization.
Software alone is not going to provide organizations with DCAA compliance. Proper internal controls and processes are also required in order to ensure compliance. The software tools from WorkTech can help implement and enforce these compliance rules to ensure that companies of all sizes comply with the regulations and standards set by the DCAA.
Large facilities have unique challenges when it comes to managing employee timekeeping and contractor labor costs. They often have different work groups that require different solutions to meet their needs. In the past, large facilities have oftentimes needed multiple software solutions to handle the diversity of their requirements. However, with easily configurable and rules-driven functionality, companies can now implement a single solution to meet the varied requirements across their facility. To do so, companies should consider the following:
Easy to Use
How easy to use is the software? If it is going to take more time to train users to use the timekeeping solution, they will take the easy way out and not properly manage their time. The solution has to be easy to use, yet capable of capturing the essential data that a company needs to track.
Highly Configurable
One of the challenges that a large facility faces in implementing a single solution for timekeeping is that different departments and business units often work within the same facility. These different groups often have different needs when it comes to recording and managing time. For example, the maintenance department may need to track time against work orders, while the security group needs only to track entry and exit times. Presenting a security guard with a time entry field for work orders could easily lead to mistakes in data entry and bad data. Therefore the system should be highly configurable, allowing the different groups within a company to track time against different priorities.
Highly Scalable
A system that is highly configurable to meet the different needs of a large facility needs also to be highly scalable. When companies start to track time against very granular pieces of data -- work orders, for example -- databases can begin to get very large. A solution needs to be architected to handle this large scale of information without sacrificing usability and configurability.
Facilities are large and complex, and tracking the labor for them can be a challenge. In many cases, facilities solve these challenges by deploying multiple timekeeping solutions. However, this can lead to inconsistency and an unnecessary burden on IT departments. By selecting an easy to use, highly configurable and highly scalable application, facilities can have all of their needs met with a single solution, saving time and money.
The California Supreme Court ruled today that while employers must provide employees the opportunity to take breaks, they cannot be held accountable if employees fail to take their breaks. This decision is important because had the court ruled in the opposite direction, employers would have been required to be able to prove that no work was performed by the employee during the time that the employee was supposed to be on break.
The court's decision does provide a couple of important reminders to employers. First, is that an automated timekeeping solution is important, no matter the size and complexity of an organization. By tracking when an employee clocks in and clocks out, employers can protect themselves in cases where there is a dispute as to when an employee was on break or not on break.
Second, the court's decision can help to serve as a reminder that more is better when it comes to data collection. If your organization is integrating with a gate control system, such as Lenel OnGuard, it is still important to capture what an employee is doing inside the gate. The more information you have regarding an employee's activity throughout the course of the day, the more solid ground you will have to stand on in legal disputes.
Third, it is important that expectations are clearly communicated with employees. This is not a software issue, but a management issue. Employees should be informed of their rights and responsibilities. They may have a right to certain breaks, but they have a responsibility to account for their time working and their time not working.
The California Supreme Court ruling today surely provided a sigh of relief to countless employers who would have otherwise faced a significant burden. However, the Court did not remove an employer's need to accurately track and manage time, and in some ways, served to remind employers just how important it is to properly account for employee time.
Time and Attendance is a specialized field, where software systems track not only when an employee works, but also what an employee does while he or she is at work. Because each organization is different, and has different time and attendance needs, it is important that the specific needs of each organization are met in a software solution. However, in complex organizations, there are often competing priorities and different levels of detail that need to be tracked depending on the part of the organization.
For example, a maintenance work group may need to track time against work orders that are managed in an external Enterprise Asset Management system such as Maximo, SAP, or Mincom. In these cases, workers should only be able to charge time against open and valid work orders that they have the right to charge time against. Without this front-end validation, supervisors and managers need to spend an inordinate amount of time after the fact fixing bad time entry.
In another example, workers may need to charge time against departments or cost centers. As they work throughout the day, they may need to allocate rtheir time to different departments. They may not need to track their time against the same level of detail as maintenance workers, but it is important that time is properly allocated the first time.
Finally, companies that have a blend of employees and contractors may need to ensure that the contractors track time and expense against their open contracts. The system should be able to handle multiple Contractors and ensure that supervisors for one Contractor cannot see the workers for another Contractor. In addition, materials and equipment should be able to be charged with the negotiated mark-ups, with rules validation occurring up-front.
One size can fit all when it comes to Time and Attendance systems, even in complex organizations. The key is to ensure that the software can be configured to meet each work group's needs, and that entering and managing time doesn't become a full time job in of itself!
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The ISC-West conference kicked off in Las Vegas this week, where a large part of the focus is on physical security and gate control. In other words, how to ensure that only people who should be at a facility are allowed on site. There are vendors such as Lenel, who have robust access control systems. WorkTech integrates its time and attendance system with access control systems to deliver the dual benefits of security and cost savings.
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The key benefit of combining time and attendance with access control is the elimination of double-entry. By tracking the time that an employee enters a gate, and recording it as a clock-in transaction, the employee does not need to clock in a second time. Companies do not need to invest in a set of time clocks to also capture employee time, thereby reducing overall costs. However, there is often the perception that gate control can only apply to the perimeter of the facility. This is not the case. Companies often implement multiple layers of access control that allow different employees and contractor to access different parts of a facility. Time and Attendance and Contractor Management software can integrate with all layers of access control and calculate transit times between the different gates.
Integrating time and attendance with access control improves accuracy of employee timekeeping and reduces the investments required by companies. Learn more on how you can integrate time and attendance with your access control system.
Automated timekeeping systems with multiple levels of approvals can significantly help organizations to better comply with labor rules, saving them significant costs down the road. Just last week, the Department of Labor announced that a Texas company, Performance Blasting and Coating L.P., paid $170,622 to 314 current and former painters and sandblasters following an investigation by the DOL that found violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The violations pertained to the act's overtime and record keeping provisions.
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According to Cynthia Watson, the regional administrator for the Wage and Hour Division, employees worked as many as 68 hours in a workweek without overtime compensation." In addition, employees were not paid for travel time in company vehicles to and from work sites, and some records were altered to remove time from employee timesheets.
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By implementing an automated timekeeping solution, companies can protect themselves against thses sorts of violations. In this sort of work environment it would be appropriate for employees to record their time on mobile devices that they can take to the work site with then. Many of these devices utilize GPS to capture the location of the employee when the labor transaction is recorded. The timekeeping software can then calculate the differences between the labor transactions to calculate in-transit time. This is especially important if the rates paid to employees for travel are different than the rates paid for travel time than for labor time.
The Department of Labor recommends other employers "use this opportunity to ensure that their record-keeping practices are accurate, and they are paying their employees in compliance with the law."
A full text of the press release from the Department of Labor can be found at http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/whd/whd20120322.htm.
There have been several stories in the news this week about payroll fraud that could have been avoided through an automated time and attendance system. First, it was announced this week that Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) agreed to pay a half-billion dollars to settle its lawsuit with the City of New York over the CityTime implementation that was rife with fraud and waste. The $500 million settlement was the largest ever for a case involving state or local government fraud. (http://bit.ly/wACC9h) While technology projects can sometimes go over budget, by implementing an automated timekeeping system to track employee and contractor time, companies can reduce the chance that a fraud like this occurs.
In a second case that was reported this week, a city payroll clerk is reported to have stolen $68,000 from Grove City, Ohio. However, the damage to the city does not stop there, as the total cost to the city is "more than $900,000, including the theft, IRS penalties, fees, and other overtime." (http://bit.ly/yicBv9)
How can an automated time and attendance software help to reduce the impact of cases like these?
Detailed Audit Trail - With an automated time and attendance software system, each time labor entries are made or changed, the user, date, and time of the change is recorded. If there are suspicious transactions entered, then it is easier to track down who is making those entries.
Reporting and Analytics - A time and attendance software system will also feature detailed reporting and analytics. These reports can oftentimes be setup so that automated reports are sent when certain events occur. These events can be configured to include multiple entries of overtime by the same user, or overtime entered for multiple employees by the same supervisor.
Multiple Approvals - Many time and attendance systems can be configured to have multiple supervisors approve time. This helps to reduce the likelihood of fraud, as both supervisors will have the ability to review the time entries before they go to the payroll system. This check and balance can help reduce instances of fraud.
An automated time and attendance software system can help reduce instances of fraud by giving multiple managers the ability to identify abnormalities in virtual real time. Alerts can be configured to fire off automatically on certain events so that multiple sets of eyes can examine these abnormal transactions. Finally, these transactions will have the username, date and time of the transactions, so that investigators can get to the bottom of these transactions virtually immediately.
It's that time of year again, when people go online or into the office to fill out their NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament brackets. Often, the focus in the workforce management industry is to decry the lost productivity -- according estimates, companies lose hundreds of millions of dollars of productive time to March Madness. According to a recent survey, 38% said they plan to watch March Madness games at work. 24% said they would skip work to watch March Madness games, either using vacation time (13%) or if they knew they wouldn't get caught (11%). In addition, 45% said they have spent time researching March Madness matchups while at work. 21% said they have spent more than two hours, 23% said they have spent between one and two hours. (http://bit.ly/CCmarchmadness)
But this article isn't about how to clamp down on employee productivity during March Madness. This article is about how to identify what the tournament teaches us about developing timekeeping best practices.
The first lesson is that past performance is not always a predictor of future success. Every team comes into the tournament ranked based on their win-loss record, strength of schedule, etc. If all that mattered was how they did in the past, they wouldn'd have to play the games. The same applies to employee performance. Just because an employee was efficient at a task in the past does not mean that he or she will continue to be so in the future. You still need to collect productivity data and analyze employee performance in order to be most efficient.
Second, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Every year in the March Madness tournament, it seems like there is at least one "12-5" upset. If you bank on that anomaly and pick all 12-seeds to go to the final four, your bracket probably won't look very good. Likewise, in timekeeping, if you don't have contingency plans for your timekeeping, you may be disappointed. Some employees should enter/manage their time through mobile devices. Others should do so through web entry systems; while other should use a traditional time clock. By implementing the right processes for each group of employees, you won't get stuck betting everything on one method, only to be disappointed down the road.
Third, you can't play favorites. WorkTech is headquartered in Somerville, MA, which is next to Cambridge, MA. Sure, we are all rooting for Harvard University to do well, as they're our hometown team in this year's tournament. However, it may not be the smartest decision to pick Harvard to go all the way. The same applies to employees. Timekeeping practices need to apply universally across all employees, without playing favorites. This improves morale, as all employees know they are being treated fairly. It also gives you better data to analyze your work group's productivity.
March Madness is here once again. Yes, employees will spend some time researching and filling out brackets. Some may even play hookie to catch a game or two. But you can apply the lessons of the tournament to help develop a set of timekeeping best practices that will add to overall productivity. Go Harvard Crimson!
One day into the IBM Pulse 2012 conference, a common theme that comes up when talking with Maximo® users is how to manage time for entire work crews at a time. While supervisors have the ability to enter time for their work crews inside of Maximo® itself, the users that we talk with say that it is time consuming. We remind them that Maximo® in of itself was not designed to be a timekeeping system -- it was designed to be an Enterprise Asset Management system. Therefore, the workflow that an EAM system follows is different than the workflow that a Time and Attendance system such as WorkTech follows. Those workflow differences, along with the comprehensive labor management offering that WorkTech provides, are key reasons why WorkTech is an IBM partner, and that its solutions are not considered competitive with the IBM offerings. Instead, users can capitalize on the strengths of Maximo® to perform critical asset management tasks, while relying on a tool like WorkTech to perform labor management tasks.
One of the labor management tools inside WorkTech that allows users to streamline labor entry for work crews is the WorkTech Time Group Entry functionality. This gives users the ability to enter time for their entire work group with just the touch of a button. Vehicle and equipment charges can be allocated against employee time, so that all costs associated with work orders can be managed on one screen. Once the employees' time has been approved, the labor and equipment charges can go back into Maximo® so that the EAM solution has accurate, up to date charges for work orders. Because the system is so easy to use, supervisors can take the time to make sure the data is accurate before the time and expense is approved.
WorkTech provides tools that make it easy to accurately manage time and expenses for companies with heavy assets. By integrating with Maximo®; companies can get the best of both worlds - a system that optimizes physical assets in Maximo®, and a system that optimizes labor assets in WorkTech.