Tracking the costs in your business
We have all heard the phrase that time is a precious resource, and with home life as busy as work life, managing time is an essential life skill. But tracking time also equates to tracking costs.
Most businesses track time in some way, some are more sophisticated than others.
Systems include:
- Time and attendance systems
- Time tracking software
- Specialist scheduling software
- Project planning and management tools
These systems are widely used in manufacturing, engineering and retail sectors. They allow management and staff to clock-in, clock-out, and run reports for payroll use. Other benefits include using the data for safety and security purposes. Take a look at Autotime
For organisations just needing to track time to tasks, with simple reporting, there are several solutions available. Make sure that you choose a solution that also allows expenses and costs to be tagged to the calendar too. See Replicon
Most manufacturing resources planning (MRP) and enterprise resources planning (ERP) software systems have a powerful production planning module. If your organisations needs sophisticated scheduling with physical resources such as engineering plant and machinery, CADCAM systems, production lines, surface mount technology (SMT) lines, as well as people, then you should consider investing in an ERP or MRP solution.
Project Planning and Management Tools
To help manage projects that last several months, a visual software tool can be really helpful. We use Microsoft Project to manage all of our projects, which typically last from three months to two years.