Time Clock MTS In Action Truck Body Refitter

by Mark Nemtsas | Oct 29, 2009 | News, Tips and Tricks

It’s not often that I get to visit a company that is making use of Time Clock MTS but today I had the pleasure of visiting a local company that does use it. They are a job based truck body re-fitter and track their employee’s time against the particular job that they happen to be working on at the moment. It is vital that they keep track of the actual time spent on a job so that they do not under quote their customers and so they know how to value their current work in progress.

Their old system consisted of a pen/paper register with each job recorded in a notebook along with a job number and customer. When employees needed to book time to a job they manually recorded it on a job card for that job. At the end of the job the cards were tallied manually and the job billed accordingly. It is interesting to note that the employees had separate manual time cards that were used to determine wages. Let’s take a quick look at the inefficiencies in this system:

1. Recording time spent on jobs took up to a minute per entry and was error prone due to bad handwriting and poor time-keeping.
2. There was considerable duplicated effort on behalf of the employer in tallying up job sheets and employee time cards separately.
3. The manual tallying was both time consuming and prone to error.
4. Referring to past records was painful at best. To find a customers job record tool several minutes of scanning through the job register finding the job reference and then locating the right job card in a filing cabinet full of job cards.
5. It was impossible to know how far through a job they were without sitting down with the job cards and tallying things up manually.

So let’s take a look at their setup now with Time Clock MTS and what improvements they’ve seen:

1. There is just one time keeping system now that keeps track of both employee attendance and time spent on jobs.
2. Actually recording attendance and time spent on jobs is now extremely quick and accurate.
3. Manual tallying of times has been completely eliminated as have calculation errors and time keeping errors.
4. The owner can determine how much time has been spent on a particular job in about 20 seconds.
5. Archival data is easily obtained and referenced, saving 10-15 minutes each and every time they need to refer back to an old job. The company has also suggested a new report that will be added to the software to significantly improve this process even more!

I must thank the company in question for allowing me to take a look at their operations. They couldn’t be happier with the software and the return on their (US$69) investment in Time Clock MTS is extremely impressive. There are real productivity improvements in both the production and administrative sides of the business, as well as an owner who is much better informed about the current state of his business. If you’re interested in using Time Clock MTS in the same way that this company is you should take a look at the getting started with Time Clock MTS and the job tracking time clock page.