dyntips.com by Fredrik Sætre

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 (Human resources > Inquiries > Time and attendance > Teams)

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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 (Human resources > Setup > Time and attendance > Indirect Activities), 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.

Payroll employees are continuously hammered with questions like: How many vacation days do I have left? What is my flex account balance? How many overtime hours do I have so far this period? What is the balance of “this” account?
These data are often presented to the worker on the payroll report or payment slip and at that time often spark a debate with a bunch of employees all at once.

Putting continuously updated account balance information in to the hands of the worker is pretty important as it frees up a lot of time for the payroll employees. Some, but not all, of this info is presented as default in the time and attendance (Paytime, Overtime, Absence and flex). However, you may want to present the worker with other account balances, like vacation for instance.
The way you do this is by grouping together different payroll types in to “Payroll statistical groups”.

The Payroll Statistical Group also has other usages like weighing average balances within a period and I’ll go in to that in a later post, but today we’re just looking at showing balances to end users.

It is a set of accounts that you group together to show a balance, and you can choose if it should show only for the current period (Paytime, Overtime, Bonus that are paid regularly) or the total account balance (Flex and Vacation). The groups are then presented to the worker in a list that you can access in the time and attendance registration form called “Balance”, F1 shortcut in the image below.

Note: The flex account and overtime are displayed in the users status window, but can also be added to this list. Also on the balance overview list you’ll find your standard payment

To set this up you must first set up the entity that group your accounts for a summed balance. Go to Human Resources > Setup > Time and attendance > Payroll > Payroll Statistics.

Create the summary groups for your accounts. “Transfer” means that the account balance for previous periods are accumulated in the view.

Go to “Setup” and add your accounts.

Now choose what balances you want the workers to view in the time and attendance registration form.

That is it! Now you can present any kind of account balances to an employee and ease off many questions to the HR/payroll department.

Good luck!