Tugboat Software Blog

It’s been an extremely hot summer here in Maryland with many days exceeding the 100 degree mark. While most people get excited talking about their vacation destinations, there is no rest for the folks that have to manage all that time off for large companies. They are the unsung heroes of summer.

I’ve worked for large companies in the past, and I never realized the effort that goes into balancing associate time off with company objectives…until I talked with Terry Schilling at Tugboat Software.

Tugboat Software specializes in Vacation Scheduling Software along with Labor Scheduling for medium to large companies. To properly set up their EchoQuote instance, I needed to understand as much as possible about Vacation Scheduling Software, and how customers purchase and use it.

Vacation Scheduling Software

For Vacation Scheduling, although organizational policies take presidence, employee requests can be handed in several different ways. For example, the organization may designate some vacation requests as “first-come-first-served”. Other requests are processed automatically in a batch based on seniority, vacation credits and other policies. From the employee’s perspective, Tugboat’s solution enables all of this with self-service features that they can easily access at home from the Internet. Even better, for those “first-come-first-served” requests, the software can provide an instant grant so the employee learns without waiting whether they can take the vacation or not.

Maintaining “Key staff” on board further complicates scheduling. But this is handled with a system that manages quotas for the total allowed off  from any group.

Of course, Tugboat’s Vacation Scheduling Software is built to handle a variety of requirements. The difficult part, according to Terry, is sorting out the policies up-front that govern time off. This is where Tugboat’s years of experience pays off.

So, before you leave on vacation, thank the person whose job it is to schedule your time. Remember that while we’re vacationing, it is their *busy* season. Even though your time off is well deserved, it must balanced with an endless set of rules and objectives to keep the organization on solid ground. The schedulers make it look easy, especially if they are using Tugboat software.

Posted by Dale Underwood, CEO EchoQuote

One might think that the longest part of an implementation project for workforce scheduling would be the customization of the software. Our customers at Tugboat have taught us that more often it’s entering local data for job skills into the SOS system that holds up the “go live” date. So this spring, we added a new offering to our services. In February of 2009, I traveled to McComb, Ohio to the Consolidated Biscuit Corporation plant to jump-start that process.

Schedulers and managers worked in advance of my visit to get that information pulled together. Once on site, I was able to enter about 95% of the employee qualifications and job preferences in four days. If the plant had decided to do this work themselves, the project might have stretched into weeks or months, while personnel who already had full-time work squeezed data entry into the nooks and crannies of their workday.

One of the keys to success for this approach was that the plant made it a priority to collect their data in advance, in order to make the best use of my time while there – this helped them set a “data deadline”. Working with their data also raised questions about how the client organized their jobs into categories and departments, giving an early heads up to the project coders who were automating this customer’s employee scheduling solution. Informal conversations with management helped pave the way for understanding of how the implementation would proceed, and for a bit of preliminary training on the system. This was a sort of value-add informed the entire data organization service process in a way that couldn’t really be accomplished by hiring a local temp just to do data entry.

CBC signed on for this project in January, and now in late April we’re in the fine tuning of customization and testing. This might be our fastest implementation ever, at least in some part because the challenging task of data collection and entry got an early boost from this new service from Tugboat.

Posted by Colleen Fitzpatrick, Project Specialist

Resistance from front line managers when implementing a labor scheduling solution happens for a variety of reason. One reason being that the order has been brought down from corporate. Unfortunately there is always resistance to any software solution that is sent down the pipe from corporate whether it be a good solution or not. Often front line managers feel their current practices are adequate. They do not realize there may be better alternatives and they might not buy into the big picture benefits. They need to get product out the door and don’t have the time to focus on what looks like a lot of work for what to them seems to be a small improvement.

Let’s face it if they can’t see how the solution affects the bottom dollar of their labor budget right away they see no point in focusing on a new project. This can lead to a setback for the project and can contribute to a downfall for the facility. This is unfortunate because the long term benefit – controlling labor cost – far out ways the short term impact on front-line managers.

Short-Term Benefits

Besides, there are other very short-term benefits. Schedulers have more time to focus on operations and other management responsibilities. Getting the right qualified worker on the right job is much simpler. The labor scheduling is done according to the rules that the facility has agreed on. Managers and production planners have the ability to make last minute changes and create “what if scenarios”. Analysis of your labor utilization can be done with reports. All of this is impossible to do when you are managing labor scheduling by hand. Altogether, the solution saves time for H.R., payroll, supervisors, and schedulers. It is not easy to put a dollar value on these kinds of savings and flexibility.

Posted by Jennifer Holmes, Implementation Specialist

We recently completed work with a customer where we were able to reduce their overall cost of labor and measure the results as well. The goal was to reduce the use of temporary workers (Temps).

Temps are an ideal resource when balancing the ups-&-downs of production demand with a finite labor capacity. Using Temps is more cost-effective than having to fill open jobs with overtime. So eliminating the use of Temps altogether is not practical. However, relying on Temps indicates that one’s existing work force is not being used in an optimal manner. And this is an indirect indicator of labor waste. If you can meet your production demand by using your existing work force in an optimal manner, the use of Temps is reduced and your overall labor cost goes down.

How? We used optimization to find the best possible match between the skills inventory available with the customer’s hourly workers and, on the other side, the labor demand required to meet their production requirements.

Tugboat’s customer operates a prepared-meals manufacturing facility with about 800 regular hourly workers. They were using 20 to 40 Temps every day. Using Tugboat’s scheduling engine to do the crewing automatically the number of Temps was cut to 10 a day.

Measuring Labor Waste

In this case, the cost of labor waste is very easy to measure. Before Tugboat’s solution 20 to 40 Temps. After, 10. Temps may not sound expensive, but. The savings calculates out to at least $207,000 per year. (How would you like to take part of that home as a bonus?)

Here’s how we arrived at that number. Using the conservative estimate for reducing Temps from 20 to 10, that’s 10 fewer Temps. At $10.35 per hour, the cost of a Temp comes to $82.80 for an 8 hour work day. Multiply by 10 Temps, 5 days a week, and 50 weeks and we get to $207,000 per year. And, this should be easy to verify. Finance can report the cost of their temporary labor force from any prior period and compare it to the costs for the current period.

Posted by Terry Schilling, VP Marketing & Sales

In a recent article in the Manufacturing Business Technology magazine, Julie Fraser discusses how “software can bring some capabilities to the plant environment that are very difficult – if not impossible – to achieve by other means.” In particular, she highlights resource allocation as a need that can only truly be addressed by systems that look at multiple products and a highly skilled workforce that cannot all be cross-trained. Software also provides visibility into the plant through automated data collection, and performance reporting. The article, “Why buy plant software in a Lean environment?” can be found HERE.

Posted by Terry Schilling, VP Marketing & Sales

At some point I’m usually asked “Why automate (the process) when our scheduler is already doing a good job?” It might seem counter-intuitive, but this is actually the best time to bring the tools of automation to bear. This is the time, before a talented scheduler moves-on to something else, to gather what they know, document it, write the software code, and fine-tune the results under their experienced and knowledgeable eyes. If your operation is running smoothly, it’s more likely you will have the time to devote their skills to a successful implementation. Wait until they’re overwhelmed or gone, and it becomes a much tougher project.

Posted by James Fitzpatrick, Product Architect

New approaches to managing the workforce can be unsettling to your line employees. Change is often a tough pill to swallow. Automating your scheduling process, by definition, can appear de-humanizing – ‘I’m scheduled by a black box!’ Actually, if handled correctly, union members come to embrace this technology. Why? Because it is consistent (fair) in the application of the contract. It is accessible to everyone, regardless of their shift. It is able to provide an ‘audit’ of every assignment it makes. You are ‘known’ to the scheduling system by your skills alone. What’s not to love?

Posted by James Fitzpatrick, Product Architect