Barcode Labor Recording for Small/Mid Shops
One of the natural progressions of any products based business is the transition to internal manufacturing "in-sourcing". Many small to mid-sized business and particularly "engineered to order" businesses make the move from having their products built by contract shops to acquiring their own manufacturing infrastructure in an attempt to improve margins or enhance top-line growth with lower product cost to stimulate market penetration. These efforts are rarely as well planned and analyzed as they should be before the entity takes the manufacturing plunge, but how to properly complete that analysis is a story for another day! Once the company has made that transition from supplier management to plant management, cost accounting and labor reporting become critical to ensure the desired results are attained and aid with the additional payroll requirements. I recently ran across a great tool to assist with such efforts, a user friendly bar code labor reporting tool from Scoutwest Inc. called StandardTime. I had previously worked with a multitude of bar code based labor and material recording systems that were linked into SAP or Oracle ERP systems but never before with a small (<20 person) fabrication operation. Utilizing bar code guns purchased on Amazon with a couple of laptops that had been previously taken out of service, we were able to quickly set up a system that was fit for purpose and didn't require the support of a "corporate IT" team to implement and maintain. Previously the client was using a system that utilized either iOS or Android to record shop floor labor transactions but one of the goals was to remove all those devices from the production areas for both safety and productivity concerns. Transitioning to barcode readers on a local network easily resolved that problem and a surprising outcome was greater utilization and accuracy of data collection. If you have a similar need in your production area, take a look and I am sure Ray and his folks will be glad to assist and there is a lot of great information on their website:
