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How work-force management technology can improve efficiency

by Stephen Hawley Martin
for Virginia Business
April 25, 2007

A work-force management technology system can roll up information in practically any way management may find helpful or revealing. The system can help executives evaluate their company's efficiency. It can take the data from a group of employees and combine it into a department. Departments can be combined into divisions, divisions into districts, and so on. This is important so that actual expenses can be compared with budgets at every level.

Employees who work in multiple roles or departments or facilities can be accounted for in the cost center where they actually work. Regular, holiday, weekend, overtime, even nonproductive time can be segmented and then rolled up across job, department and facility lines as an expense type, rather than as an aggregate by business unit. Such roll-ups give the organization a total picture of the cost of compensation programs.

What's different from roll-ups from payroll registers is that the data can be totaled for any time frame -- not just for payroll cycles -- and related to actual business events and activity performed. Nonproductive time can be parsed or classified into travel time, training time, administrative and so forth. These categories -- which may be considered overhead -- can be rolled up across the organization and evaluated as well. Totals for nonproductive time relative to output may reveal things about staffing levels that were otherwise undetectable.

Comparing actual value-added time spent by workers who in theory do the same jobs can cause employers to completely rethink how they do business. A study conducted by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS), for example, determined that Toyota's product development engineers were, on average, four times more productive than their American and European counterparts. Western engineers spend about 20 percent of their time actually creating something of value for consumers. Toyota's spend 80 percent.

According to Michael N. Kennedy, who wrote a book about the Toyota development system, Product Development for the Lean Enterprise, the reason is that Western systems follow a somewhat bureaucratic, linear approach that focuses engineers on individual tasks and due dates for each new model under development. Toyota does not focus its efforts on the development of specific vehicles or on completing deadline-oriented tasks such as detailed drawings or schematics.

Rather, Toyota's engineers focus on the development of the many subsystems that come together to form automobiles and trucks. The result is that Toyota engineers are less concerned with non value-added minutia. They concentrate instead on developing auto and truck components in the belief the superior subsystems that result can be mixed and matched to create a whole host of new product possibilities. Because of Toyota's obvious success, many Western companies that depend on new products to keep them competitive are now striving to emulate the Toyota product development system.

If there are internal sources of excellence that ought to be emulated within an organization, roll-ups and comparisons may spotlight these performers. With data that can be parsed in any segment, timeframe and related to key performance indicators for the business and delivered in real time, the proliferation of this excellence doesn't have to wait until the annual report.

The capabilities of work-force management technology are moving ahead at a lightning pace and changing the way many companies do business. A new book from Oaklea Press by Lisa Disselkamp, called Working the Clock, is intended to give executives insight into the many ways it can help them run their businesses more efficiently.

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Stephen Hawley Martin is a former principal of The Martin Agency in Richmond and the author of more than half a dozen books including his newest, Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done Without Doing It All Yourself. He is editor and publisher of The Oaklea Press, a book publishing business dedicated primarily to helping business executives increase productivity.