With the announcement of Workforce Central version 6.1 at its annual user conference in October, human resources software specialist Kronos has quietly staked out a broader footprint in the manufacturing world.
Kronos executives told customers attending the Orlando, FL, conference that version 6.1 contained more than 1,000 enhancements, such as the ability to track not only human resources on the shop floor, but also the machines that those workers operate.
At the heart of this capability is the new Performance Monitor feature, said Gregg Gordon, Kronos’ global practice leader for manufacturing, in an interview. Through the monitoring tool, which is part of the Activities module within Workforce Central, shop floor managers can view in one place the status of machines, shop floor workers, and work in process — all in real time. Performance Monitor, for example, may show that a machine is down and allow the line manager to shift labor to another work cell.
The marriage of labor and equipment tacking ties Kronos’ Overall Labor Effectiveness metric to the more traditional measure of Overall Equipment Effectiveness, which many manufacturers use to assess the performance of their machinery.
In a typical scenario, Gordon explained, a specific maintenance person or machine operator may be associated with an inordinate amount of machine downtime. Workers on the shop floor enter specific reason codes for time when they are not working, including equipment setup, breakdown, and unplanned downtime. The 6.1 product allows managers to see the associations between labor and equipment and get to the root cause of the downtime.
“We’re not just collecting the information and then a week or two later you can see what the results were. We’re collecting the information and you can see it right now, anywhere you are in the plant,” Gordon said. Users will also be able to view those same performance metrics at a remote plant, via a Web interface.
This new tool in Kronos’ arsenal puts it squarely in the terrain of manufacturing intelligence and MES vendors, but company executives describe it as a natural extension of the product’s capabilities.
In an interview at the conference, called KronosWorks, Aron Ain, the company’s CEO, characterized the machine tracking capability as a real-time complement to MES or ERP systems, which typically deliver batch reports on machine performance, not instantaneous KPIs.
As for the rationale behind the new functionality, Gordon said it was mostly a matter of catching up with Kronos’ manufacturing customers, many of which had already customized their systems to deliver such equipment data.
“Our customers are saying, ‘We’re using [Kronos] to measure people, but we also have machines ... We would really like to have one system that we can implement [to] measure machines and people and also understand where our WIP is.’ ”