Automate employee timesheets with Access

[barb wagus]

Hello,
Has anyone sucessfully created a database that can track
the labor hours put into a product work order?
In 2001 I began designing a database for tracking labor
hours. The idea was to a) replace paper timesheets and
records, and b) collect data to determine actual time to
produce and efficiencies, etc.
Each worker should log in when s/he begins a work order,
and log out when his/her work on that order is complete.
Each work order passes through many stations and
different workers over the course of 2-5 days.
However, the project stalled because the end result of my
efforts was not very user-friendly. In order to
correlate the start and stop time of each worker, the
employee had to search through the records for that work
order to find his/her start record, and add his/her stop
time to it. This is the same process that is used in the
paper format, but obviously, it's easier to look at a
sheet of paper, recognize one's own handwriting and jot
down the time...especially if computer skills are limited.
Anyhow, it seems there must be an easier way. Please
respond if you have experience with this topic.
Thanks for your help!
Barb

 

[Dave]

Hi Barb,
We have been running a system just like the one you need
for over 3 years using Access 97. It consists of a very
basic front end for end user input, a seperate front end
for reporting, graphing etc... and a back end which
contains all the 'work order', time and any other data.
The system originally used Start and End times, but proved
to be too messy, especially when staff forgot to stop the
job they were working on. Now the system works on actual
hours/mins spent on the job.
Dave

 

[Guest]

Thanks for responding, Dave.
I assume that you mean you ask each staff member to log
the (estimated) number of hours s/he has spent on a
project when it is completed?
I think our situation is a little different, because the
data collection is taking place in a manufacturing
environment. We don't (really) care who worked on what,
or even when, we just want to know how many minutes it
takes to complete the sub-assembly of the smallest model
in our product line, how many minutes it takes to perform
testing on the largest model, etc., etc.
In any case, when you were using start and stop times,
how did you correlate the two for each job? Did the user
have to look through the open jobs to add his/her stop
time?
This is a little hard to explain in text. Hope you can
help anyhow!
Thanks!
Barb