What can Activities do for you?
Activities integrates the tracking of your employees, activities, and results into a single solution that provides real-time visibility to productivity and tools to analyze data over time to make strategic improvements.
You can track information for the following types of activities:
- Continuous daily operations (for example, production line work)
- Activities that must be tracked against a planned budget and schedule.
You use Activities to manage the following stages of progress:
- Execution and tracking
- Monitoring
- Activity closure
What types of information can you track?
Examples of information that you can track are:
- Detailed direct and indirect labor costs that are reconciled with employee timecards
- Details on work-in-process such as job status and results relevant to each activity
You can also see work days broken into events for hourly or salaried employees working individually or as a group on specific activities.
Once you have finished tracking information, productivity reports can be used to show who did what and when.
Activities and paid time-off (PTO) pay codes for project view timecards
When partial PTO is involved in a project view employee’s work day and activities are worked, activities fill in the timecard as they are entered, disregarding any direct PTO entry in the timecard that is not also represented in the employee’s schedule. To get the time to appear correctly in the employee’s timecard managers will have to do one of the following actions:
- Require that project view timecard employees submit Global Time-off Requests Request subtypes that employees use to request time off for vacation, illness or recovery, appointments, personal time, or other absences. Time-off requests can be configured to support many different employment scenarios. (GTORs), noting the specific start time and duration of the PTO, for those pay codes that do not already appear in the employee’s schedule. The approved GTOR will correctly modify the employee’s schedule so that activity entries can determine where the PTO appears in the employee’s schedule and fill in before, after or around the PTO.
- Manually modify the employee’s schedule to add the PTO pay code for the specific start and amount of time needed for the PTO. The manager should ensure that the ‘shift time is overridden’ option is checked to ensure the employee’s schedule is updated correctly.
Sample daily work cycles
Depending on your company’s requirements, employees and managers have a number of different ways to interact with the system. Some of the most common ways are described in this section.
Example day for hourly employees
To enter labor details about activities, an hourly employee submits Activities forms using a PC, a data collection device (for example, InTouch), or mobile device. Forms collect information about activity start and stop times and the results of an activity over a period of time.
Duration employees can use Time Period Entry to enter labor details about activities.
Example day for salaried employees
Salaried employees typically enter durations (the number of hours) for each activity that they worked on. Durations can be tracked in either of two ways:
- Activity duration entries (entered using a form from a PC, a data collection device, mobile device or entered directly into the activity columns in the employee timecard).
For example, an employee who tracks his time using activity durations might do the following at the end of the work day:
- Open the timecard.
- Enter eight hours worked on Monday, prompting eight hours of Idle time to appear in the activity columns of the timecard.
- For Monday, enter the activity or activities performed and the number of hours to charge to each activity.
- Continue to enter activities and hours until they add up to 8, thereby eliminating the Idle time that originally appeared in the timecard activity columns.
Some employees might submit activity forms to record the total number of hours worked on specific activities.
Note: Depending on your business environment and policies, salaried employees might enter their time every few days or every week instead of on a daily basis.
Daily cycle for managers
Managers can perform the following tasks:
- Run reports
- Check the status of an employee
- Monitor work-in-process
- Edit activity event results
- Approve timecards for employees
- Adjust standards for hours, rate, quantity or cost
Managers can also perform the following tasks for employees who failed to complete them: clock in or out, start or stop activities, and report results and quantities for an activity.