Control Your Labour Costs

Many manufacturing operators are struggling to keep labour costs in check from high purchasing costs to labour cost not been monitored or tracked. Business owners do not have the tools and are inefficient in the way they view labour costs. To control your labour costs means a better estimated quote and better cash flow in your operations.

How to identify and Control Your Labour Costs

There are many indicators that you can identify in your daily operations to improve your operations. Many manufacturing and fabricators ask the question, How do I reduce and control my labour costs?

Questions you can ask which will help you Reduce Labour Cost

• Are your estimates driven by excel?
• Not able to track or check quality control?
• Labour costs\time is not recorded or time is tracked on a job card by hand?
• Artisans spend to much time looking for drawings and correct stock?
• Jobs are over priced and we lose these jobs to our competitors?
• Artisans do not know what the next operation is?

Are Your Estimates Driven By Excel

Many manufacturing operations currently use excel to drive their quotes or estimates. Excel with all it’s pro’s has many con’s, broken links and subject to many typo’s. Many business owners notice that they have high labour costs but the costs are not recovered properly, this can be due to the fact when compiling an estimate the artisan or foreman has forgotten to add labour items to the quote.

To reduce the risk of incorrect quotes, a manufacturing operation must consider an ERP integrated solution, which is driven by an accounting system with templates and correct pricing, giving quick turnaround and consistent quotes every time.

Not Able To Track or Check Quality Control

Many business owners and workshop managers struggle with tracking jobs and their statuses, this leads to time wasted hunting down jobs and ascertaining their status costing time and labour. Without a proper 4IR system in place keeping track of jobs and using tools to ensure business rules are kept, improving quality control and less Quality Inspection Rework, reducing labour costs and improving your underlining profit.

Labour Cost & Time Not Recorded or Recorded Manually By Hand

This approach is bad news for your operations not only are you not getting the correct time against estimates, with the manual process somebody is nominated as the Prefect and has to go and on a daily or even an hourly time basis go to each individual and make sure they are completing the time sheets and correctly. This way of doing things inherently adds unnecessary labour costs and you will not get an accurate activity based costing, which leads to poor recovery of costs.

Your also do not have the tools and information to estimate properly, which leads to either under quoted jobs or over estimates quotes and losing the job to your direct competition.

Artisans Spend To Much Time Looking For Drawings & Correct Stock

With a manual system artisans struggle to find or locate drawings, as there is no electronic link between jobs and drawings. This leads to costly delays and longer turnover of job delivery times.

Artisans are also running around hunting for stock items or do not know what stock is to be used against a specific job, with a manual system, no proper stock sheet is kept and picking slips are non existent, allowing for items to be allocated to multiple jobs, missing items and poor control of stock levels. This creates a bottle neck in the job process increasing labour costs and reducing productivity time.

Jobs Are Over Priced & We Lose These Jobs To Our Competitors

While we endeavor to get our quotes as accurate as possible we do struggle getting accurate and consistent quotes out to our customers with manual processes. One of our biggest headaches is, broken formulas and typos on excel spreadsheets. This leads to quotes going out wrong, and can be way to expensive to the customer and you lose the deal. Another reason business owners struggle with over priced estimates, is due to the fact that not only is your quoting manual, your costing has been run through a manual process so when estimating labour, you do not have an accurate idea of the true costs and therefore you generally either under estimate or over estimate.

Artisans do not know what the next operation is

How often do you sit back in your chair and ask yourself how productive your artisans are can you track productivity? Are they aware of all their duties planned for the day? Many business owners would say no to these two questions. Without a digital solution your artisan struggle to find their activities planned for the day and the associated documentation that belongs to that activity.

The Solution

Now that we have asked some very important questions, we now know, that we do not have a proper solution with the use of manual quoting and tracking processes.

With JobPRO Manufacturing we can assist you with improvements with all your pre-shop-floor and Shop-floor processes. Giving your correct costing and consistent quoting, delivering a competent estimate to your customers every time. You will never stress knowing if you have lost money on a deal or lost the deal to over priced estimate.

Give us a call today, we would love to meet you.