EX-CELL-O Machine Tools, Inc. Takes Labor Tracking to New Levels with Kronos Solution
For more than 80 years, EX-CELL-O Machine Tools, Inc. has been manufacturing specialized metal-removing equipment for automotive plants and other large production industries. In fact, EX-CELL-O builds equipment that can cost as much as $110 million and take up to 18 months to build.
EX-CELL-O North America has a lot to keep track of, and it needed a workforce management system to keep up with high-volume production. A previous workforce management approach consisted of proprietary systems in two of its three plants, but they couldn't even provide basic time and attendance functionality. And while the third plant successfully evolved from manual timesheets to an automated workforce management approach, it still had no way of tracking shop floor labor activities. To make matters worse, all of these systems consisted of independent software applications running on different hardware platforms.
EX-CELL-O implemented the Kronos iSeries Central suite, and as a result, it significantly reduced the amount of time, money, and effort it used to spend tracking employee and shop floor labor data throughout its entire North American operation. In fact, EX-CELL-O's use of the Kronos iSeries Central suite was so effective that it earned a Kronos Best Practices Award for tracking labor costs associated with rework and research and development, all of which helped it become more competitive. Kronos' Best Practices Awards are presented annually to those organizations that achieve excellence in the application of Kronos technology.
The problem: pinpointing labor costs
EX-CELL-O's previous systems — various software products for automatic tracking of time and attendance data throughout the organization — just didn't give EX-CELL-O the solution it was looking for.
Dave Nelson, EX-CELL-O applications systems, remembers the problems they used to face. "Nothing was able to enforce paid time to the actual time employees spent on the job," he says, explaining that this adversely affected their ability to measure labor for many different purposes. "We couldn't track subcontractor's labor or even provide remote workers with an easy way to submit their work-related data. We definitely needed a better system."
Filling a tall order
Fortunately, EX-CELL-O knew exactly what it wanted. It sought to implement a single application, one solution that all employees could use across the entire organization to submit and process time and attendance data. EX-CELL-O also wanted job tracking — from a single point of entry — so all labor data could be fed directly into its ERP system.
That wasn't all. "We also wanted our new solution to give salaried employees a way to book direct time right from their desktops, and we were looking for an audit aid to assist accounts payable with our subcontractors' labor invoices," explains Nelson. EX-CELL-O discovered that the Kronos iSeries Central suite was the best solution to handle all these needs.
Accurate data and improved insight
Now, with the Kronos system firmly in place, hourly and salaried employees — even subcontractors — swipe bar-coded ID badges through Kronos badge terminals. Labor and shop floor data is collected and validated in real time, giving EX-CELL-O managers much better insight into employee- and project-related data on the shop floor.
"Validation allows us to control what projects employees can log on to, enforcing that only relevant jobs are credited," explains Nelson. "The terminal entry module allows us to extend virtual clocks to the salaried engineers at their desktops, which helps collect direct time to the job for our front office personnel."
Then the Kronos iSeries Timekeeper application, the integral component within the Kronos iSeries Central suite, applies EX-CELL-O's specific pay rules and processes the information for payroll - quickly and accurately. EX-CELL-O also uses the Kronos iSeries Timekeeper application to interface shop floor data directly to its ERP system. "This allows us to track not only what happened every day for payroll purposes, but also what took place during the day in regards to our ongoing projects," says Nelson.
Using all data to its full advantage
By collecting subcontractors' labor data right on the shop floor, EX-CELL-O now can treat their data just like that of any other EX-CELL-O employee. "Our accounting department can now audit subcontracted time with the invoice we received from the supplier while still balancing all related labor for the project within ERP," says Nelson. "And the History module of the Kronos iSeries Central suite gives us a historical view of what happened for any employee, for any date."
Additional benefits
EX-CELL-O is an engineer-to-order environment, which means that each project is a new experience for everyone working on it. And when you're manufacturing one-of-a-kind machines, each job is bound to have some unexplored territory.
"Our engineers sometimes have to try some new technologies," explains Nelson. "So a considerable amount of time may be invested in a concept that may or may not be feasible. We need to track the labor component of this research and development cycle, not only from the standpoint of labor within a current project, but as another benchmark of labor to adjust and/or remove to be more competitive on the next bid."
EX-CELL-O also tracks rework. "We manufacture unique machines for a single project," says Nelson. "We don't produce parts repetitively by setting aside broken parts for later rework. But rework does sneak into the build process as design changes occur while completing the project." Tracking rework helps EX-CELL-O prevent "double-dipping" of labor hours when quoting new jobs, and this makes future proposals as competitive as possible.
This has begun to pay real dividends. Of the 14 projects EX-CELL-O has monitored so far, it has statistically identified between five and eight percent of the job going to rework. An eight percent reduction in labor rework will help EX-CELL-O's proposal department in quoting more competitively for new projects.
Leveraging technology for future results
As EX-CELL-O looks to the future, it envisions other benefits it can achieve with Kronos solutions. "By making the application available to all users over the Web, our service people would be able to provide payroll and job status information remotely," says Nelson, explaining that this would help increase productivity. "We're also looking at making Kronos iSeries Central available in a touch-screen environment to provide self-help data right on the shop floor. This would also yield additional timesavings."
After implementing the Kronos iSeries Central suite, EX-CELL-O now finds itself in a better place: more efficient, more productive, and most importantly, more competitive.
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