Problem:

Employees at Plant Engineering Services, a subsidiary of Fluor, were required to enter their timesheets on the Flour corporate database. They also needed to enter their time and projects worked for the client’s billing and reporting. They also needed to enter time spent on projects to the client’s master scheduler.

Analysis:

Because of the triple entry required from each employee, the administrative assistants spent a lot of time finding and correcting errors. The hours billed had to match the hours paid. Also, the client was building an application that would check the hours billed matched the hours reported on the schedule.

Solution:

I created a database that tracked the hours worked and the projects that were worked on for each employee. At the end of the day, each employee would enter their time worked and the projects they worked on. This simple entry created many reports to make the job easy for people that rely on labor information:

• Every morning, the administration assistants would see a report of which employees did not fill out their time record for the previous day.
• Every morning, the administration assistants would generate a billing report for the client.
• Every week, the administration assistants would generate a scheduling report for the client’s master scheduler – and it always matched against the hours billed.
• Every morning, the project engineers could get an up-to-date report on the labor usage for all the projects they are managing.
• Biweekly, the employees would receive a project and hours report for the corporate time sheet entry. {Flour was not interested in letting us make this an automatic entry}

Results:

Because of the single data entry process, employees were able to spend more time on their project work, and less time on data entry. The administrative assistants did not need to worry about reports not matching. They could now focus on budgeting and forecasting. The client’s billing reports always matched the scheduling information and trusted the accuracy of Plant Engineering Services.