Case Study: Small Manufacturing Business

Running a small manufacturing shop in the United States is not for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, in the past few decades, we have seen many operations shut down due to foreign competition and other factors. However, those unfamiliar with the industry might be surprised to learn that there are domestic manufacturers that have not only survived but are booming.

Case Study: Cabinet Shop

Today’s case study looks at a custom cabinet shop geared to the high-end residential market.

First, let’s discuss the history of the business. During the recent recession, the owner started adopting lean manufacturing practices, which he credits for helping his business weather the economic downturn.

Though lean manufacturing processes were initially established for large assembly-line manufacturing facilities, you can apply many of the fundamental principles to companies of any size or industry.

Initially, the owner focused on production. After that, he turned his attention to HR processes. At the time, they were using paper timesheets, an old school time clock, and an archaic scheduling processes. Needless to say, they were cumbersome and inefficient. Because of this, he started looking for solutions.

His goal was to apply lean manufacturing principles to people processes.

Specifically, he wanted to:

1. Eliminate redundancy through automation
2. Reduce time devoted to non-billable processes
3. Leverage data to continually increase profitability
4. Improve document management

Solution: WorkforceHub

Although WorkforceHub handles almost all HR processes, in this article we will focus on the timekeeping and scheduling modules.

TimeWorksPlus is the industry-leading timekeeping solution in WorkforceHub and is ideal for small manufacturing employee timekeeping. Now, let’s look at how the solution capably fulfilled each of his primary objectives.

Eliminate Redundancy

Before WorkforceHub, each employee would fill out a timecard, then a supervisor would approve it. Following that, the payroll manager manually entered the data into the payroll system.

In other words, three different people touched each timecard each payroll period!

It’s key to understand that TimeWorksPlus syncs with the TimeWorks Touch time clock (and other Swipeclock time clock hardware). After the cabinet shop got TimeWorksPlus, onsite employees started clocking in with TimeWorks Touch. At the same time, when picking up materials, out on a bid, or at a job site, employees clocked in with their smartphone or work tablet to the same integrated system.

TimeWorksPlus captures timecard data and stores it in real time. Employees and managers can now access it in a variety of different formats. This boosted efficiency tremendously. Managers could now approve timecards at a glance, for instance. In addition, employees can see their pay stubs, work schedule and PTO accruals in the system.

Minimize Time Devoted to Non-billable Processes

Prior to implementation, Workforce Management took most of the HR team’s time and a significant amount of time for supervisors and employees as well. Now that employees manage their own electronic timesheets and hours are imported directly into the payroll system, the HR team has time to help with sales and billing. And the owner has determined that even if the business triples in size, he won’t need to hire more HR staff.

Before WorkforceHub, the managers had been using Excel spreadsheets to develop employee schedules. TimeSimplicity has customizable templates and drag-and-drop functions that allow managers to create team schedules in minutes.

Leverage Data to Boost Profitability

TimeSimplicity enables the owner and management team to analyze and adjust worker schedules to improve employee productivity. Overtime alerts and schedule enforcement have lowered labor costs and boosted the bottom line.

Improve Document Management

Manually capturing, storing, and accessing HR data was unbelievably inefficient before the implementation of WorkforceHub. Employee time and attendance, schedules, time cards, PTO tracking, payroll processing, and compliance reporting ate more than twenty hours a week for the two-person HR team. Now, there are no more error-prone paper time cards to enter into the payroll platform, no tedious accruals tracking, and audit-ready records protect against any DOL action.

What can WorkforceHub do for your business? Call today for a demo.

UPGRADE TODAY

Swipeclock offers WorkforceHub, the powerful, fully-integrated WorkforceHub that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and organization.

WorkforceHub includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. WorkforceHub is developed for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and lessen labor costs.

We can get you up and running with WorkforceHub immediately. Contact us today to request a demo.

Or are you interested in becoming a reseller? Check out the Swipeclock partner advantage now.