ERP systems excel at automating back office processes. But their batch process design used to facilitate communication between modules, especially labor information, limits their ability to provide complete and timely information required to calculate accurate labor costs, shop floor status and identify waste within a process.

In an effort to better obtain this information, a growing number of manufacturers have leveraged best-of-breed workforce management systems to extend the value of their existing ERP systems.

Workforce Management systems can bridge the gap in unexpected ways. While workforce management is often thought of as a back office process to track and schedule labor, one of its main benefits: accurately tracking labor hours down to the minute to produce a paycheck can also be easily extended to allocate those labor hours into production. And once a manufacturer can determine the actual time and labor cost tied to an activity and its results; performance, costing and continuous improvement insights are not far behind.

Timely Performance Information

Data collection has always been a stumbling block in shop floor performance systems. Dashboards abound, but the cost of collecting and integrating the data always seems to make these projects difficult to justify.

The labor tracking component of workforce management has an inherent advantage. Every employee knows how to interact with this system and already uses it two or more times a day to track his or her paid hours.

By interfacing the system to an ERP to automatically reconcile labor hours and production results against a production schedule, a manufacturer can identify labor utilization, labor performance, and quality. In addition, other non-labor information becomes visible such as Work-in-Process Status, estimate-to-completion of a work order as well as machine downtime and other variances and unproductive hours.

With labor details and production information all in one system and reconciled, separate but interdependent issues can be analyzed more effectively. For example, Performance and Quality have long been known to be dependent metrics. But since most manufacturers measure them in different systems and in different ways, such as performance of a team compared to quality levels of a product, it is difficult to understand the impact they have on each other when one changes.

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