Poolrite
ENTERPRISE in the Manufacturing Industry
Poolrite sought a solution that would give them power over their payroll process and more importantly, power over their business.
“We can now calculate our production and departmental costs on a daily, weekly and monthly basis with the press of a button…It’s dead simple! It does everything that we wanted it to do.”
Fred Auret, Financial Controller, Poolrite
The Problem
Poolrite, a large, well recognised pool product manufacturer and service provider, have over 103 staff around Australia. In 2004 they were managing their payroll with the help of a 15 year old Bundy Clock, which captured clock in and clock out times for all production staff in the manufacturing unit. Their payroll department were then forced to manually decipher the data that the Bundy Clock collected to capture overtime and sick days or missing staff.
In March 2004, the Bundy Clock showed its age, requiring expensive upgrades, so Poolrite sought another solution that would give them more power over their payroll process and, more importantly, power over their business.
The Solution
Poolrite sought a system that would not only capture staff attendance times, but also capture the exact amount of time spent working on each production order to ensure accurate production costing. Another important requirement was to accurately capture time spent on each job by field service agents.
“I was really looking for three core requirements in our new system
- To make our payroll system easier to automate;
- To capture precise information on the cost of fulfilling production orders;
- To capture actual service times by field service agent because time is money in the service industry” said Fred Auret, Poolrite’s Financial Controller.
After an extensive search through local and international products, Time & Access was selected to provide a total solution that would fulfil Poolrite’s requirements.
“They were local, so we knew we could get ongoing support, they gave a good presentation, and their pricing was in line with my expectations” said Fred Auret. Time and Access provided a comprehensive solution, incorporating a number of customised data collection components to fulfil Poolrite’s complex requirements:
- Barcode Scanners for tracking actual times on the production floor. Instead of swipe cards, all staff on Poolrite’s manufacturing floor carry a simple laminated card with their individual barcode, and each production order for the floor is allocated a barcode. Staff simply register on and off each production order as they work. This data can be accessed immediately to see who is working on which production order at any point in time (and who is not working on anything).
- Swipe Card readers for tracking attendance of sales and administrative staff in the office and feeding back into the payroll process.
- ENTERPRISE for collecting and analysing data, interacting with the payroll system, and providing comprehensive job costing and management reports.
- PC Clock enabling all staff in remote offices to clock in and out through their PC/terminal.
“We can now calculate our production and departmental costs on a daily, weekly and monthly basis with the press of a button…It’s dead simple!” said Fred Auret. “It does everything that we wanted to do.”
“We see a number of key benefits:
- Our timesheets are easily captured and fed into the payroll system
- We can now see when staff are disappearing or arriving late
- And we have so much power over managing the costs on the production floor.”
“ENTERPRISE helped us to capture all those little extra costs that no one bothered recording.”
“It gives us much greater control over the business.”