Tugboat Software Blog

Workplace scheduling software specialists Tugboat Software have recently announced the release of their Event Scheduling tools to be used in conjunction with the company’s landmark employee scheduling software. This new addition to the company’s SOS (Schedule Optimizing Software) platform is designed to provide organizations with tools needed to plan and schedule meetings or events for hourly employees during regular shift hours,

By integrating this new Event Scheduling solution from specialists Tugboat Software customers gain a competitive advantage by ensuring that each member of their manufacturing team undergoes required training and safety meetings for their role while also maintaining in-house productivity. This tool automatically ensures that a company’s manufacturing processes continue without interruption.  While attending meetings or events, this tool will also automatically assign the workers to overtime if required.  Tugboat’s Event Scheduling solution extends the power of their employee scheduling software by also scheduling a back-up to take the position of the employee during their period of absence. This ensures seamless production during meetings or events. . Another way in which Tugboat Software benefits organization is that it tracks the training history for each individual employee, so that management has an up-to-date record of the relative skill levels of each employee within their workforce, and an overview of the working resources available at their disposal.

To find out more about this latest tool from the industry leaders at Tugboat Software, contact their in-house representatives today.

January 26, 2012

One of our General Mills customers recently re-bid 96 jobs. This was due to installation of some new equipment. When they’ve had to do this in the past, with a workforce of over 400, this was an administrative nightmare: the workers filling out individual bid sheets, sorting through the bids, ranking them in seniority order, awarding new bids. Then due to bumping, they’d have to do it over again figuring jobs that needed to be re-bid.

Tugboat’s recently launched tools have automated this entire process. A staffing level planning tool enables management to plan the number of needed jobs. It automatically posts the new jobs to a job bidding window which is available to all employees via Tugboat’s self-service portal. This allows employees to do the rest by themselves. The bids stay open for two weeks so they can also cancel and prioritize their bids. The bids are processed automatically when the bidding closes. All this with no paper!

Had they continued doing this by hand, explains the General Mills scheduler, it would have taken over 2 month.  “It made our life a lot better. Tugboat got us through the bidding process more accurately. A planner’s dreams come true”.

Does this situation occur with your workforce? When the workforce is increased or decreased in size? Or for simple open jobs when someone leaves the workforce?

Newport Beach, California based business software developer Tugboat Software has recently announced the introduction of new tools which automate job bidding. They are designed to allow organizations to align workforce levels with changing production demand. These new tools are employee-driven and enable workers to engage in the job bidding process while automatically awarding bids from qualified candidates.

Within manufacturing environments, production requirements regularly change as demand fluctuates due to changing market demand. Companies within the manufacturing industry can often be left with too few skilled resources at their disposal during critical stages of production if they do not have an automated system of scheduling in place within their facility.

Tugboat Sofware’s new job bidding tools are integrated with a labor planning interface that allows management to planthe number of jobs that are needed within each department via shift. By utilizing this software, decision-makers define the minimum or maximum jobs required during times of light and heavy demand so that the company is then ready with a plan in place as the market fluctuates.

Utilizing Tugboat’s proprietary scheduling platform, organizations will have access to job bidding and staffing level planning tools that conform to their in-house labor scheduling rules and also conformto the unique nuances of the regulatory environment within their facility.

It is this high calibre of customized and comprehensive workplace management system that is now helping Tugboat’s partners around the globe to rise within their industries.

To find out how Tugboat Software can benefit your organization, contact their offices today. Your organization is one phone call away from streamlined productivity.

About Tugboat Software:

Headquartered in Newport Beach, CA, Tugboat Software is an established leader within the field of workflow scheduling software development. The company’s solutions are utilized by corporations around the globe to optimize in-house workflow processes. For more information, please go to www.labor-scehduling.com.

Software development experts Tugboat Software have announced the introduction of a new application to their existing roster of innovative work schedule program optimization solutions. The company’s new vacation scheduling application is engineered to capture and manage employee vacation requests through an online self-service portal.

Through the solution’s comprehensive data access functionality, employees at all levels of the company are able to build their own vacation schedules in order to both maximize their level of control over their own workflow and align their scheduling requirements with those of the organization. This ensures that employees are focused on in-house objectives while allowing them to take initiative within their roles in the company. Employees are able to make vacation requests, assign priorities, cancel requests and get reports all through one streamlined self-service system.

This self-service system features an in-built mechanism for calculating employee vacation entitlements based on facility or inter-departmental quota, automating the entire process so that management staff can simply review their vacation requests online to receive an instant understanding of the way in which their workforce is being scheduled.

Across many industries, solutions that provide employees this sense of control over their own scheduling requests have been shown to improve employee job satisfaction, thereby acting as a leading-class talent retention mechanism. This proven increase in employee satisfaction means that work schedule program optimization solutions such as the new vacation scheduling application offered by Tugboat Software are now in higher demand than ever before within the manufacturing field.

Newport Beach, California workforce scheduling specialists Tugboat Software have recently announced the introduction of their latest new capability for their laboroptimization of workflow within manufacturing facilities. The company’s new workforce scheduling application  now includes the ability to plan and schedule events for employees during regular shift work job assignments.

As part of Tugboat’s  work schedule program events scheduling ensures that each worker is scheduled to attend necessary training meetings while the program also schedules a qualified backup to work during their absence. Events or meeting can last anywhere from 30 minutes to all day.  The application will build a work schedule program that is designed to streamline the way in which a company’s workforce operates and eliminate the often costly misallocation of resources during training events.

Tugboat Software’s president, Patricia Schilling, explains, “Our customers are under pressure to make the best use of the mix of skills in their existing skills inventory. Somehow they need a way to cross-train their workers even while they’re usually punched in.” Tugboat’s solution is tightly integrated with their work schedule program. “This means that if they are away from their regular job, someone with the same skill has to take their place so production is not interrupted. Often this requires that the replacement worker comes and works overtime for as little as 30 minutes. This new feature takes care of this so now there’s a way”. Patricia also explains that this solution also tracks the training history for each worker.

Within a broad array of industries, organizations are now searching for programs that will help them to automate their internal scheduling processes, including events or meetings, in order to achieve higher productivity and reduce operating expenditure. Within this field, Tugboat Software has become one of the leading lights. Their pioneering work has helped some of the world’s largest corporations streamline their workflow management systems and align in-house training objectives with employee resources.

Workforce scheduling requirements and rules tend to vary greatly between companies. The new capability from Tugboat, however, conforms to in house rules and policies, and then automates labor and event scheduling that then becomes the focal point of the scheduling application. With events as well as labor scheduling fully automated, management staff are now better positioned to respond to other key areas of the business that may require direct input from decision-makers.

Now, companies can truly gain first-hand control on their scheduling management thanks to this leading-class solution from industry experts, Tugboat Software.

Amongst pressures faced by manufacturing operations today, matching the size of one’s workforce to their projected production requirements is a growing challenge. Tugboat’s new job bidding tools include a labor planning interface that manages the desired number of jobs for each department and shift. Users can develop a list of minimum jobs required during both slow and peak times to assist in determining their desired staffing plan. Once these levels are set, available job assignments are posted for job bidding to existing employees on the employee Kiosk. Tugboat’s workforce scheduling solution will also automatically awards the new job assignments according to HR policies.

What makes this challenging for larger operations is that typically scores of employees, or more, are affected. They refer to this as ‘furlough and recall’. If people are furloughed, job assignments for the remaining workforce have to be reset. However, any job assignment changes must conform to existing union or HR-policy rules, so. There’s a ripple effect on other workers as senior workers bid for jobs now that the workforce has been reduced. Similarly, during a re-hire multiple new jobs are opened up and again current senior workers are entitled to bid on these new jobs. This again has a ripple effect.

Tugboat’s tools enable employees to bid on job assignments during a downsizing or bid on new positions when production is again increased. Tightly integrated with Tugboat’s labor scheduling solution, these tools considerably reduce the workload for HR and front-line managers by placing responsibility for job bidding in the hands of each worker. Tugboat’s proprietary optimization engine will automatically assign new job positions according to all of the Customer’s site-specific labor scheduling rules while conforming to their job bidding policies and planning goals.

We’ve also developed this new software so that it is tightly integrated with Tugboat’s skills management solution. Workers assigned to new jobs, are automatically signed up for any needed on-the-job training.

Creating a labor schedule is a key engineering step in your production planning cycle. Given your multiple products and deadlines over multiple shifts, days or weeks and given the volatility of any pool of labor resources, can your production plans be completed on time? Whether work orders are created in QAD, SAP or Preactor, now there is an answer.

Tugboat’s Labor Scheduling solution, delivered Software-as-a-Service, fills a labor roster that begins as QAD Work Orders, or as a Preactor Order Sequence. The work orders are first converted into a Labor Demand including jobs with start and run times over shifts and days. Then SOS quickly fills the roster for the jobs given your available resources and rules, with optimized job assignments. Now there is visibility and control in your planning cycle for the review of a planned labor roster and how it can support or delay your production plans.

We recently attended the QAD Explore 2011 user conference in San Antonio, TX as a Silver sponsor. At the conference, we spoke with Derek Singleton, ERP Analyst, who had the to opportunity to catch up with Phil Friedman, Vice President of Marketing for QAD. Derek and Tugboat wanted to know what was new in QAD’s 2011 release. Phil explained their key announcements around business intelligence, mobile functionality, and a continued emphasis on cloud ERP.

Read more:

http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/manufacturing/whats-new-in-qad-2011-1051811/#ixzz1NTniiWNY

Even if an application appears to really meet one’s needs, there is always the challenge of implementation. A financial manager for Coca-Cola recently asked, “This application looks like it will do the job but answer this: how much trouble will we uncover when it comes to implementation?” He was specifically referring to the resistance that would likely occur from their schedulers and a unionized workforce.

When it comes to those that actually do the scheduling, most would rather do things the way they’ve been doing them – even if there is a little inefficiency and maybe hidden costs due to some redundancies. When it comes to the workforce, most will naturally want to avoid changes in how jobs are assigned. However assigning them more efficiently takes some analysis of the rules and policies that control how the workforce is currently scheduled.

So how do we implement a fully automated application like SOS without running into resistance from the schedulers and the workforce? Along with getting the data for jobs and people in place, a project usually starts with focus on the existing scheduling rules. However, there’s a lot more to automation than getting all the rules and policies analyzed and here’s a way forward.

Right from the start, even from the Internet at home, Tugboat’s solution enables workers to make requests for:

•    Overtime

•    Days off

•    Vacations

•    Training

•    Open jobs

This interface also makes reports easily available to the workers for:

•    Absences

•    Requests

•    Available OT

•    Scheduled jobs

This is a two-stage approach and it takes the pressure for change off of the schedulers. Automating requests and reports means, right from the start, less paper and less discussion with each and every worker. And the workforce? Automating requests and reports will make life on-the-job a little easier without raising questions about how jobs are assigned. It’s called empowerment. For management, the cost of getting to this level of implementation is fairly low. Having data for your existing workers and jobs uploaded into the application is all that’s required.

To summarize: save the challenge of analyzing and documenting all your rules and policies until a later stage. Get the easy stuff in and running for an early payback and buy-in from the workforce

In large manufacturing facilities, it’s not hard to find managers who’ll acknowledge, on any given day, there may be extra workers on the floor. Sometimes referred to as redundant manning this sounds like an easy target when looking for labor waste. But is it? Yes and no. Here’s the difference.

Under certain circumstances having an extra body on a line is a good thing. Any machine can get a little quirky and require an extra pair of hands and eyes just to get the product down the line. There are appropriate times and places when extra manning makes sense, so. Any automated labor scheduling solution must enable an override for human judgement. However when this becomes an habitual alternative to your standard manning, something isn’t right.

If say the labor standard for an operation is 10 workers, yet some supervisors are only comfortable with 11, then management has a couple of choices. Pay for the 10% premium above the standard or adjust the standard upward. In other words, if this needs to happen every day or every shift, then change the labor standard to 11.

A solution that allows the scheduler to make special assignments, assignments that typically fall outside of the basic manning for building the schedule for a particular product, will highlight these non-standard assignments. What’s often missing from any manual labor scheduling solution are these kinds of tools that enable management to point out special assignment situations.

Building labor standards that reflect your actual requirements is a key part of your focus on skill management. Most importantly, labor standards must reflect your best tribal knowledge about how the most efficient manning for each and every section on your manufacturing floor. When using an automated scheduling solution, your labor standards are built into the system and are automatically put in place with each schedule. As a result, the kind of habitual overmanning highlighted above can be eliminated.

What happens when a supervisor cherry-picks a specific worker for a given position? This is not just a version of the special assignment problem we’ve been discussing? Training is where we need to look for help here. If there is only one worker capable of manning the position, where’s their backup? What happens when they’re on vacation? This points to the need for training management and training planning being tightly integrated with workforce scheduling and not just for new hires.

What are the “Best Practices” (BP) for workforce scheduling? Most managers in operations and HR would like to see these documented. But what is BP?  BP is a method, process, or activity, which conventional wisdom regards as more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other method, process, etc. when applied to, in this case, labor scheduling. Ideally, BP’s are the best way of resolving scheduling issues for each employee across all shifts, departments or crews. So why even within the same facility is there so little agreement about BP’s for labor scheduling?

In reality, given today’s operating budgets and given the push-and-shove getting product out the door, finding any BP’s written down is rare. You might hear, “It’s all in the labor agreement”. Not likely. Even with a union contract, there are always side agreements that some managers may know about while others have never heard of. There are quite a few problems that workforce scheduling has to solve on a day-to-day basis that are simply not addressed by a typical labor agreement. How to schedule for surges in production or service demand, the opposite, engineering down time, employee job preferences, access to overtime, meetings, requests for time off, training and a lot more that has to be worked into the schedule every day.

When it comes time to undertake a scheduling rules analysis, Tugboat Software is typically first-on-the-beach. For documentation, we typically find a mixture of:
•    HR policies that cover hiring, firing, benefits – a great deal in fact. However they only address labor scheduling in very broad terms. They don’t address the daily volatility.
•    Payroll policies that again cover lots of bookkeeping details and include rules but also don’t address labor scheduling per se.
•    Spread sheets which may track jobs and who’s qualified to perform each.
•    In 24/7 operations something which keeps track who works days on or off
•    As mentioned, if there’s a union, a contract.

When you roll back the stone, what you find governing labor scheduling are “past practices”. “This is how we’ve done it before.” Again, these are mostly unwritten. With an automated labor scheduling project, one of the main business goals is bringing these past practices into the light of day and getting them organized. However when you run a discussion about how labor scheduling actually gets done, it isn’t long before someone says, “I didn’t know we did it that way”. Or, “That’s not the way we do it on our shift (our department)”. Converting best practice into BP is difficult without a lot of design analysis. And a big part of design analysis is getting managers to agree on which of their past practices are actually their BP.

Until you go through the real work, past practices are usually taken as BP. Unfortunately this often disguises, or justifies how scheduling rules are applied differently or unevenly from one department or shift to the next. Fortunately, there are a lot of strong reasons for investing the time and effort into a scheduling rules analysis.
•    Capturing the best institutional knowledge about hot to schedule your entire operation
•    Eliminating the game playing
•   Lowering your cost of labor
•    Reducing unneeded overtime
•    Eliminating grievances
•    Moderating the pressure on your scheduling operation
Then there’s the relief of knowing how to schedule when those skilled managers are absent.