Vendors have one bad habbit:

"Never say no to the customer", everything is possible. But how many of us the "feature" payroll automation through workorder ?

My administration of 30 people is done with excel, consisting of some personal excel files, totalized in two other excel files. I have attendance, sick leave, overtime, vacation, meal compensation, vacation saldo etc.. for the whole department sent to Human Resource on 1 A4 paper in the first week of the month. I already know who has scheduled vacation on december 31.
Have to meet the CMMS/EAM/ERP that can beat the simplicity and price given by a $400 office suite.
If they have to program our overtime rules in our CMMS, we will pay a fortune to the vendor, and we will be doing other people work. Will the CEO will recording his pay/bonus also in the CMMS? What about the accountant, the engineers, the waiter and all other people that do not work in maintenance?

Svanels,

couldn't agree with you more...vendors (especially software vendors) will tell you..."absolutely", "no Problem", you "have to do it this way", this is the "best/only way"....all that and they may not know squat about your process or what is really valuable for your situation...(that being said, there are some good ones....we'll call them rare finds).

Sounds like you have a nice system for you situation that is completely functional and easy for you to manage/admin.

For my situation, the more integrated the better...if I had to key time, vacation requests, attendance, and more for the 90 hourly technicians...I would pull my hair out...if I hired one person for this express function, I would still lose more time than we currently do because the information would have to be communicated in some manner. With a streamlined process, the technician will be able to directly input time, vacation requests, and other admin functions in less time (change of address, funeral leave, requests for time off, plus more). The integrated approach will allow more flexibility, better control, and ultimately cut costs...for our situation. In our company, you can multiply the impact by streamlining the processes for all of our plant sites.

We still have a lot of growing and improving to do...we are going to a gate-keeping system and payroll will be fed from it...this will definitely be a cultural change for us, as we simply must have the hours associated with the work orders. Currently, at the end of the day, you can pull up the time entry screen, punch in your employee number, and this brings up your time entry screen. You punch in the work order number, select the activity code, and enter the hours. Hit enter and you are done. The foremen will review time and approve at end of week (some post at end of everyday). Some hours are direct-billed to cost center (training, meeting, vacation, and such). All other hours are associated with a work order.

As for pay rates, we use a blended rate for the department (current security not strong enough to put individual rates in system). The blended rates are a combined total of pay, medical, bonus, shop overhead, etc. Rates are updated yearly from data provided by accounting department. Our Engineering staff will record their hours to projects they are working on, but not 100% of their hours goes to projects.

The data is used to determine amount of effort/resources being used on asset/department/work group/job levels and this is used to generate different metrics to analyze how we are performing.

Payroll automation through work orders is being used because it was the best method at the time to get away from paper time sheets. Like I said previously, this is changing with the new gate-keeping system to be more efficient. I worry about the integrity of the data when this does occur. I see a number of people (some on this site) that only want the "wrench" time put on the work order or "just the time spent on the job". This is a concern for us, because when we are planning the jobs with estimated time, we consider the best estimate to include lock out, set up, job, and clean up. This is critical for us when allocating / leveling manpower for scheduled outages for optimization of the length of outage. I don't think we will have a major problem, because we all know how important this is to our planning process and what it means to our reliability processes, but it will test our discipline from time to time....

I am a favourite of only the wrench time for the job. There also other parameters like downtime, reported time and a lot of other times in our system (Datastream0.
For the core business my key indicator is the wrench time (manhours). When we have turnarounds this is the parameter for scheduling jobs. Permits, travel time, material packets can be controlled with appropriate planning.

But everbody has a different situation, there are no two maintenance sites the same, even in the same company.

Crikey, I had not expected so much response.

Apologies if I left something unclear. I am not talking about paying staff based on the hours they log to the CMMS – they will get paid for 8 hours work regardless. If they can only account for (say) 6 hours on Work Orders, the remaining 2 hours would be direct-billed to a ‘cost centre’ number. Time spent on non-maintenance stuff (administration, stores, customer relations, vacations, sick leave, etc) also go direct to cost centre numbers.

What the vendor is emphasizing is that to track what each maintenance job costs, we need to log each separate job to a separate Work Order number. If a job take 2.75 hours to complete then that job’s Work Order number goes on the timesheet with 2.75 hours labour. Otherwise how can we know what that specific job cost in labour?. In this system the W.O number is just a sequential number, no inferred activity or site codes, just a plain number.

My concern is that there will be confusion among crews who genuinely attend a lot of different maintenance jobs with a new W.O number used each time. With the proposed CMMS, doing 5 different activities at the same location would require 5 Work Orders. Same story if just one activity but 5 different locations. It just seems a bit cumbersome that’s all and as svanels points out we could just get tied up in paperwork Do all CMMS work like this?

Yes, we are looking at having some repetitive jobs on single Work Orders left open for a month/quarter, such as pothole patching in each city zone. The trade-off is we lose detail of exactly where the job was done and thus an accurate maintenance history of each asset.

Inputting timesheets directly into system a nice idea but some of my fellas still struggle with literacy, let alone computer literacy. Maybe later...

Seigga813,

quote:

You punch in the work order number, select the activity code, and enter the hours.

So your activity code is separate from the Work Order number? The CMMS we are looking at has the activity embedded within the Work Order (eg. Work Order No. 12345 has an activity type = “repair sign faceplate”). Is this unusual?

“Wrench time” vs “total job time”... my own thoughts are that mobilizing to the job site, set up traffic control, deal with customer, etc are all integral to the job, even if the actual “wrench time” to fix the pothole or the busted water pipe or fallen tree is only 15 minutes. Hence I lean toward costing “total time” per job though I can see where others would want to separately know the ancillary costs to find productivity improvements (also my crews would tell me where to get off if they had to account for each nitty gritty task within each job).

Thanks all for your thoughts.

quote:

My concern is that there will be confusion among crews who genuinely attend a lot of different maintenance jobs with a new W.O number used each time. With the proposed CMMS, doing 5 different activities at the same location would require 5 Work Orders. Same story if just one activity but 5 different locations. It just seems a bit cumbersome that’s all and as svanels points out we could just get tied up in paperwork Do all CMMS work like this?

Well that depends on how the work order is created. In my system I can have several tasks to be executed for a job in the same work order. Each task can be for a different crew. for example the job can be "Improvement to the conference room", and have ilumination related tasks for the electrician, walls / floor details for the building maintenance repairers, even some furniture changes for an external contractor.