Briggs & Stratton Corp. Significantly Reduces Costs Using Kronos for Manufacturing
Download Printable Version
Briggs & Stratton Corp., headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the world’s largest producer of gasoline engines for outdoor power equipment. Its wholly owned subsidiary, Briggs & Stratton Power Products Group LLC, is North America’s No. 1 manufacturer of portable generators and pressure washers and a leading designer, manufacturer, and marketer of home standby generators, along with lawn and garden and turf care through its Simplicity®, Snapper®, Ferris® and Murray® brands. Briggs & Stratton products are designed, manufactured, marketed, and serviced in more than 100 countries on six continents. The company employs 6,000 globally and has nine U.S. locations.
CHALLENGES
- Remaining competitive and keeping costs down using a variety of manual and automated workforce management processes
- Determining the correct mix of labor during seasonal production cycles to predict and control labor costs
- Knowing the true cost of labor without accurate and detailed information on direct, indirect, and overtime activities
- Controlling regular time and overtime costs to improve labor effectivity rates on each production line
SOLUTION
- Automated workforce management and labor tracking solution to provide a detailed view of labor activities for improved labor planning and reduced operational expenses
BENEFITS
- Quickly determining the right mix of temp staff and FTEs needed to meet seasonal production cycles results in yearly savings
- Ability to project the weekly cost of temporary labor nets savings in the first year
- Visibility into labor activity in granular detail in real time helps managers identify issues early and take action immediately
- Detailed tracking of all hours results in reduction in overtime hours, leading to a first-year 11 percent increase in labor effectivity and sizable labor cost savings
- Automatic and consistent application of rounding rules has added significant annual savings
THE STORY – Briggs & Stratton Corp.
To support its growth strategy, Briggs & Stratton Corp. acquired several power equipment manufacturing companies over the past few years. With plans for future growth, Briggs & Stratton knew it needed to centralize workforce management with a single automated solution that was easy to implement, extensible, and integrated. “The Kronos® Workforce Central® suite has been key to supporting our strategy,” says Christopher Albanese, business analyst at Briggs & Stratton.
Intuitive and easy to use
Implementation and training went smoothly. Kronos train-the-trainer sessions enabled Briggs & Stratton staff to easily train managers on the solution, and Kronos KnowledgePass™ provides additional training on demand. “Workforce Central’s short learning curve has made it easy for employees to use the system,” notes Albanese. “For example, on the shop floor they don’t need to do anything complicated to execute a maintenance work order. It’s very intuitive.”
Controlling production labor costs
Briggs & Stratton’s business is seasonal — requiring considerable temporary staff. “With our locations cycling up and down, a supervisor can quickly glance at a Kronos genie to determine if additional labor is needed and if temps or FTEs are the best fit,” he says.
One of the temporary agencies is integrated into the Kronos system, allowing Briggs & Stratton to process temp staff payroll, monitor staffing markup, and provide the agency with accurate billing information. This data has enabled Briggs & Stratton to project the weekly cost of temporary labor, negotiate lower staffing contract rates, and realize savings in the first year.
The system also lets managers track indirect time of employees, including downtime. These hours and costs are automatically removed from production time calculations, giving managers the true cost of labor. “Not only can we capture our downtime by department, employee, and supervisor, but we can work it out to any layer of granular detail,” shares Albanese. “Daily reporting enables us to see a problem and immediately solve it.”
With labor activity from the Kronos system integrated with SAP, the company’s ERP solution, Briggs & Stratton can now see definitively which labor hours and dollars are attributed to vendor product defects. Vendor chargebacks have saved the company money.
Reduced overtime, improved effectivity, and rounding rules deliver savings
“Very quickly it was apparent that the Kronos system gives us the ability to track not just direct or indirect hours, but also overtime hours in a way we’d never seen before,” says Albanese. The company realized it could cut overtime hours by increasing flextime and utilizing FTEs at the base pay rate.
“This gave us a very quick return on investment,” he adds. The increase in Briggs & Stratton’s labor effectivity rate — production costs relative to regular, overtime, and double time — by reducing overtime was a “massive benefit,” he says. “We raised our effectivity rate 11 percent and realized sizable savings in the first year.”
Briggs & Stratton has also realized savings with consistent application of rounding rules. “By using rounding rules, for even six minutes per punch, the result can be significant savings,” offers Albanese.
Kronos solution complements SAP capabilities and improves compliance
In addition to direct and indirect labor, Briggs & Stratton uses its Kronos solution to track labor activities to model numbers and even the material level, depending on the facility. “Our Kronos system has made it easier for the shop to use SAP,” he claims.
Maintenance staff at both warehouse and shop locations use Workforce Activities to track and manage maintenance activities. Work can’t begin until a work order is confirmed in SAP and then appears in Kronos, almost in real time. Once a manager has signed off on the work order in SAP, the department can be charged for the maintenance time. With this managed automatically rather than manually, auditing is improved and compliance issues are mitigated.
“Our internal auditors appreciate our Kronos solution because the audit trail is so detailed,” notes Albanese.
Looking down the line
Briggs & Stratton has plans to complete the U.S. rollout of its Kronos solution and use even more of its capabilities. “It’s a state of continuous improvement in using our Kronos solution to improve our operations,” he says.
©2011, Kronos Incorporated. Kronos and the Kronos logo are registered trademarks of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. For a full list of Kronos trademarks, please visit the “trademarks” page at www.kronos.com. All other product and company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change. All rights reserved.