AX7 T&A: Teams and assistant

In a dynamic factory setting where human resources go back and forth between different jobs, roles and machines it is important to track each resource to get a good overview of the costing. Some times people go around helping each other on tasks and also work as a team throughout the entire day or for a longer period of time.

When many workers work together on multiple production orders within a period, you can task one of the persons to be responsible to register time for all users. This is done by creating a “team”.

Creating a team

In a team you have the pilot and the team members. The pilot is responsible for the terminal registrations for all the team members. This is done by simply changing jobs as usual. The team members use the “assistance” functionality to join a team. Simply click Assistant and select another signed in worker to start a team.

 

Managing your team

An overview of current teams can be shown in the Teams form (Time and attendance > Inquiries and reports > Teams)

Teams can not be “nested”, meaning that a team can not be a part of another team. Not because of the functionality. The tree view is clearly there to illustrate a multi level hierarchy. There just isn’t any way for a team pilot to assist another team pilot. You would have to hack it to do so, and then I don’t know what happens to cost calculations.

The team pilot, Bill Malone in the example above, will change jobs and the cost of the team members (Dana and Christina) will be assigned to the jobs that the pilot is working on.

Before the pilot checks out for the day, and still is pilot, he will get a message saying he has to change pilot before checking out.

The pilot then uses the “Assistant” function as well, but since he/she is a pilot, the menu will say: Change pilot.

After selecting one of the team members to be pilot, the user will be demoted to team member. A dialogue shows to confirm this.

 

Setup: System jobs needed

If you try to work with assistance and you get a message about missing jobs, it is because your system is not ready.

Go to the Indirect Activities (Time and attendance > Setup > Indirect Activity Categories), enter the “System” group and add the required jobs like this:

Add jobs for the following system functions:

• Start assistance
• Stop assistance
• Change pilot

Remember to check the “registration” to be able to use it in time and attendance.

Smart use of this feature for shifts/hand off

A smart way to use this feature is if you have a resource that handles many jobs at once and do a shift change. I have a customer that has a production line where many (40-100) jobs can be active at once from about 1000 released jobs.

Instead of the shift coming on has to register to all the jobs and select them from the enormous list of jobs, he/she uses this feature for a hand-off.

This is what you do:

1. The shift coming on signs in and registers as assistant on the one working on all the jobs.
2. The shift going home registers the person coming on as pilot and checks out.

The jobs are then handed over. A great time saver.

Go to the AX 7 – Time and Attendance guide page