Improve and Simplify Shop Floor Time Tracking in Business Central

Welcome and agenda

Hey, good morning or afternoon everyone. This is Mark Hamlin here, and we’re in for the last webinar of the year today. I’m going to take you through shop floor operations, but really what we’re going to go through is a bit of the manufacturing stuff that you need in Business Central, and what you need in your shop operations that we can provide in Business Central.

What we’re going to do today is go through a little bit about us and the various applications we have. If you’ve been on these webinars before, well, it’s time to get a coffee. But if you haven’t, this will be interesting information. Then we’re going to go through Shop Floor Insight and the general applications we have available for our manufacturing solutions.

I’ll do my best to keep it within the hour, depending on how fast I talk and how many questions you have. If you do have any questions, feel free to enter them in the question box in that GoToWebinar panel, and I’ll do my best to answer them as we go through the session. With that, let’s jump in.

About Insight Works and what we do

I’m not going to go through all the numbers, that’s craziness, but I will mention we’ve been around for about 10 years now. We work mostly through our reseller partners, so if you have any questions about what we talked about today, or we need pricing, those sorts of things, you can talk to your reseller or go to our website. We do list basic pricing on the website as well, and there’s a contact form and a chat box you can use to reach us.

We work mostly in manufacturing, distribution, and also retail—basically anything where you need to touch physical product is where we can help you. We do a lot on the warehouse and shipping side, which applies to manufacturing because once you produce the product, you’ve got to get it out the door. We’ve got major manufacturers out there—automotive manufacturers, OEMs—using our solutions, and a lot of people in Business Central using these apps.

Free apps and common tools to start with

We’ve got a stack of applications we offer, and a bunch of these are actually free—both for the warehouse and the manufacturing side. We have over 30 free applications and add-ons available, but these are some of the more common ones.

The first one that’s very manufacturing oriented is the Enhanced Planning Worksheet. If you’re using the requisition worksheet or planning worksheet in Business Central today, or you’re looking at doing MRP and MPS in Business Central, you really need to grab that Enhanced Planning Worksheet. It’s free, you can plug it in and use it. There’s a paid version as well that gets you some other goodies, but grab the free one and use that instead of the base Business Central worksheet. We can also do sales forecasting, and that’s also a free tool in Business Central.

On the scheduling side, the Graphical Scheduler—grab it. It’s free. There’s no licensing, we don’t need the name of your first born or anything like that. Just install it and you can see your production orders and drag and drop them around. If you don’t have complex scheduling requirements, it’s great for visualizing what your facility looks like with those production orders.

Doc Extender is also good if you want to drop drawings onto an item or onto a production order. It gives you drag-and-drop capabilities anywhere in Business Central, and it can store information in SharePoint as an option. That can support a full document management approach inside BC, and then you can show those links out on the shop floor so people can access drawings or whatever they need.

On shipping, if you’re doing domestic parcel shipments, Order Ship Express is great and doesn’t cost you anything. You can ship out of Business Central and you don’t need UPS WorldShip or FedEx Ship Manager anymore. And if you want to add barcoding for receiving, picking, bin movements, or inventory counts, WMS Express gets you that capability without paying for separate warehouse software. Shipping and barcode capabilities in Business Central don’t have to cost you anything.

Manufacturing workflow overview: plan, schedule, execute, ship

What we’re mostly going to cover today is Shop Floor Insight, but I’m going to talk about a few other things. Shop Floor Insight is one part of the manufacturing process from a technology perspective, and there are other things around that process we need to deal with.

First, we do planning. That’s where you’d use the Enhanced Planning Pack if you want the paid version, but the Enhanced Planning Worksheet tool is free and that’s what you want for production planning. You’ll run MRP and MPS with the Enhanced Planning Worksheet. If you get the Enhanced Planning Pack, you also get analysis tools like variance analysis to figure out after production is completed whether you did well or not.

Once we’ve planned everything and we’ve got production orders and purchase orders, we send it out to schedule. Business Central doesn’t do a great job of scheduling, so we want to figure out how we’re actually going to send that out to the shop floor.

There are two options here. The first is the free Graphical Scheduler. As soon as I’ve created my production orders—planned, firm planned, released—I can view them, drag and drop them, change colors based on status, and get a nice manual scheduling tool for visualization.

But dragging and dropping all day isn’t fun, so the alternative is MX APS. APS is Advanced Planning and Scheduling, but I like to call it Automated Production Schedule. I hit a button (or run it in the job queue every morning) and I get a schedule I can actually execute on the shop floor. It looks at capacity, labor, material availability, tooling, and any constraints you want, and generates something you can run without messing around with it.

After scheduling, we execute on the shop floor, and that’s where we’ll focus on Shop Floor Insight. There are also other execution-side tools like Maintenance Manager for preventative maintenance and break/fix management. If you use Maintenance Manager, MX APS can schedule maintenance along with production to make it as least disruptive as possible. Quality Inspector is another one—capturing measurements, pass/fail, and other quality information—either within Shop Floor Insight or through a separate interface like a tablet or a metrology lab process.

As a side note, Microsoft Business Central will have a core quality management module coming out (what they call “quality management”) early in the new year, and that’s a subset of our solution that they’ve licensed directly.

We also have Safety Logbook, which is a free app to capture HSE events like spills or injuries or certifications.

The purpose of Shop Floor Insight is to capture what’s happening on the shop floor—labor, consumption, output, and those sorts of things—and feed that back into Business Central in real time. Then, the next time we run the schedule, we know what actually occurred and we can generate a schedule we can execute.

After planning, scheduling, executing, and inventory, we need to get it out the door. You can use tools like the Fulfillment Worksheet to determine what you can ship today, Warehouse Insight or WMS Express for scanning barcodes to pick and ship, and then Dynamic Ship for subscription shipping features like LTL, multi-carrier rate shopping, and packaging. If you’re just doing domestic parcel shipments, Order Ship Express may be enough and it’s free.

There was also a question on PDM/PLM. We don’t have a PDM or PLM integration. There are apps out there that can do that, and it sits outside the workflow we’re talking about here—more BOM design and BOM management. We don’t provide those tools.

Shop Floor Insight capabilities

We want to focus today on Shop Floor Insight. I’m not going to go through everything in detail, but I’ll mention a few things. We can do time and attendance if you want to capture when people log in in the morning, when they leave, automatically deduct break time, calculate overtime and double time, and then ship it off to your payroll system. It’s optional. Shop Floor Insight is predominantly used for capturing information for production, but we can use it for payroll as well.

Deployment options: kiosks, personal devices, and scanners

There are a few different ways you can deploy Shop Floor Insight. The most common is fixed terminals—kiosks out on the floor, a laptop on a desk by the work center, a tablet mounted somewhere—where people walk up and share the terminal and use touchscreen or scan in and out. It can be a standard PC, old Windows laptops or desktops, or Chromebooks. Chromebooks are popular because Shop Floor runs in a browser, they’re low cost, and you can get them without fans and moving parts so they handle dusty environments well. Tablets, phones, and scanners are also an option.

We also have a personal device interface that typically runs on a phone, scanner, or tablet. It gives you similar capability—consumption, output, and so on—on a personal device. This can be handy if you have very mobile workers, or if you’re recording time against projects in Business Central. We support time capture for projects, production orders, service orders, non-productive time, and fixed assets. The personal device interface works with projects, production orders, and non-productive time.

If you’re using Warehouse Insight already (or need it), you can run Shop Floor Insight inside Warehouse Insight on scanners as well. That gives you inventory management and labor management on one device, if you like.

Business Central Cloud note: local service for fixed terminals

If you’re deploying fixed terminals and you’re running on Business Central Cloud, there is one thing to note: an on-premises service is required. That means there’s a little application that runs in your environment and communicates with Business Central.

Instead of having each terminal log in independently, all the terminals communicate with that local service, and that service is the only thing that logs into Business Central. That gives you more control over security and who’s logging into BC, because all the devices are communicating locally and you’ve got one connection up to Business Central.

It’s lightweight, it can run on a Windows machine, and it could even run on one of the shop floor terminals. You don’t need to go buy a server. If you prefer fully cloud, you can host the service on Azure, but I usually recommend throwing it on one of the on-prem terminals and away you go.

Barcodes, paperless workflows, and identification

Before the demo, I want to talk about the barcodes I’m scanning. There are a couple ways to work with Shop Floor Insight: barcode scanning, touchscreen, and swiping on a personal device.

You can have employee badges generated from Business Central to identify employees at a shared terminal. You can also integrate with things like door access cards so they can tap a card to log in, or they can type a user ID instead of scanning a barcode.

The production barcodes are typically printed on a shop traveler, but they don’t have to be. They could be printed on labels, or you could scan an identifier you already use for the product moving around the shop.

People often say they want to go paperless, and I agree. The challenge is you still need something to track the WIP moving around on the shop floor. If there’s a label or a piece of paper identifying that WIP, and it has a barcode on it, we can scan it. Barcoding is great because we don’t make mistakes when we barcode—we’re physically verifying what we’re working on. Touchscreen selection and typing has more room for error, and nobody wants to type.

Demo: planning and scheduling in Business Central

Let’s jump in and have a look at what this stuff looks like in Business Central and in Shop Floor. I’ll start with Business Central quickly. I’m not going to get into a ton of detail, but the Enhanced Planning Worksheet allows you to run the standard Business Central MRP logic or a nicer purchase planning logic that’s more meant for distribution and warehousing environments, but often works in manufacturing too. One advantage is you don’t get a lot of junk messages like “cancel this” and “new that.”

The big advantage of the Enhanced Planning Worksheet is it’s just nicer. It gives you more information about what you’re trying to plan, vendor planning summaries, tools to visualize what the system is asking you to do, and the ability to update planning parameters right from the screen instead of drilling down a bunch of times.

After planning, we schedule. We’ll jump into the Graphical Scheduler, which is free. There are videos online that show how to configure views—color, work center loading, and so on. By default, it shows production orders and relationships, with zooming and navigation. And you can drag and drop, which will reschedule other operations.

The issue is Business Central doesn’t care about capacity, so you can end up with everything scheduled on the same work center on the same day and time, which isn’t a schedule you can execute. You can fix it manually with dragging and dropping, but that can be a lot of work.

The alternative is MX APS, Automated Production Schedule. You can generate a schedule for a time window, and it takes those same production orders and schedules them in a way you can actually execute. It chooses machines, maximizes utilization based on the rules you set (like earliest delivery), and it considers capacity, labor, material, tooling, and other constraints. For example, you might have two welding booths so you can run two orders at a time, but if you lose a welder due to a shift change, it will schedule only one at a time because labor isn’t available.

This matters because it’s pretty tough to execute on the shop floor if you don’t have a decent idea of what you’re supposed to be working on. When you’re happy with the schedule, you can activate it and execute those orders. You don’t need MX APS to run Shop Floor Insight, though—you can run Shop Floor with or without MX APS and with or without the Graphical Scheduler, as long as you have production orders (and projects/jobs as well).

Demo: Shop Floor Insight kiosk interface

Now let’s look at Shop Floor Insight. This is the kiosk-style interface where I’m going to record my time on production orders. The way it works is I scan my badge to log in. If it’s a shared terminal, I identify myself with the badge. If it’s a dedicated terminal at a work center, same idea. In the morning, I identify myself and the terminal can stay unlocked under my user ID for the day.

Everything you see is real time with Business Central. There’s no extra database or batching or integration—it goes direct to BC. Based on the person scanned in, they see their time card for the day. If it’s blank, the next thing is to tell the system what I’m working on. I scan a barcode and it automatically identifies the production order, operation, item, and brings it up. Simple as that.

By default, we want you to scan barcodes generated from Shop Floor Insight, but if you have a serial number label or another label that identifies the WIP, we can likely scan that label you already use.

The terminal can lock after a period of time, or I can scan my badge again to lock it. If someone comes up behind me and scans their badge, it flips to their time card. If an hour goes by and I’m done, I come back and scan the next activity. If I scan a “meeting” barcode, the system automatically clocks me off the prior activity based on a setting that can be controlled at the user group, user, or work center level.

You can also configure whether people can run multiple activities simultaneously. For example, a machine operator might run multiple jobs at once. That’s just a setting based on the employee, work center, or group.

Batching and autosplit

Another option is batching. If I’m doing multiple production orders simultaneously—like a laser cutter, paint booth, or powder coating—or if each operation is only a couple minutes and I don’t want to clock in and out every two minutes, I can scan all the production orders I’m working on for the next hour or two. Then when I clock off the batch, it automatically splits the time across those orders. It does that proportionally, so larger parts can be allocated more time than smaller parts. We call that autosplit.

Non-productive time codes

We also support non-productive codes. You can define whatever non-productive codes you want, or you don’t have to use them. The value is it makes it easy to report on productive versus non-productive time and understand what’s happening in your facility.

Touchscreen and role-based kiosk views

If someone else scans in—like Linda—the interface can look different. Those fact boxes on the side can be shown or hidden based on the person, group, or work center. For Linda, she sees links and a picture, and she also sees the work coming up at her specific work center for the next hour, day, or week—whatever you set it to. From that list, she can tap an item and clock on, or she can search for a production order by typing part of the description or order number.

This gives you a touchscreen-friendly option if you don’t want barcoding or you want to reduce paper on the shop floor.

If a maintenance technician logs in, they can see maintenance orders they need to deal with, including work instructions, documentation, and asset pictures. Maintenance staff will typically use a tablet or phone, and they can work in that same environment.

Consumption, output, quality, and work instructions

When I clock into a production order, I can use the fact boxes to access additional capabilities. I can see the bill of materials, and I can record point-of-use consumption. If I’m pulling material with lot numbers or serial numbers, I can scan or enter those while consuming materials.

We can also do output. I don’t have to be clocked into a production order to record output—I can select a production order and output directly. Output has options for lot numbers and serial numbers on final operations, output history, and scrap codes.

We also support quality inspections. You can set up inspections by work center, item number, operation, or whatever combination you want. Operators can record inspection information from the Shop Floor interface, or a QC person can use a tablet interface to record quality information.

Work instructions can come from the routing or the production order. Customer-specific instructions can be on the production order and will show alongside standard instructions. If work instructions aren’t enough, you can add document links—often using Doc Extender—by dragging and dropping documents onto the item or production order. Then they show up in Shop Floor for the team to access drawings, diagrams, websites, or even internal Business Central links.

If all you care about is capturing labor time, all of these extras can be hidden. It really depends on what you want to do.

Traceability and rework tracking

One of the important things people sometimes overlook is traceability. With consumption, you get lot and serial traceability for material. On the labor side, you also get traceability—if you get a warranty claim later, you can see who did the work, when they did it, whether they recorded comments, and whether any of it was rework.

For rework, you can classify time as exceptional work and assign root cause codes. Maybe it’s engineering, maybe it’s a wrong drawing, maybe it’s something else. The point is you can capture that waste, understand where it’s coming from, and report on it. Rework is expensive, and if you’re not capturing it, you don’t know how much cost you’re incurring. This makes it easy to track to a specific root cause.

You can scan a barcode for rework, or on a touchscreen you can tap an activity button and select the rework code. You can define whatever rework and root cause codes you want in the system.

Mobile interface and Warehouse Insight integration

We also have a mobile device interface that can run on a phone or tablet, and we have the Warehouse Insight interface that can run on a tablet or scanner. If you’re already using a barcode scanner for inventory management, you can use that device to track labor time too.

On the phone-style interface, you can see your time card, what’s in progress, your production orders to clock in and out of, and projects as well. You can open a project, see details, and tap “clock on,” or swipe into an activity. You still have capabilities like work instructions, consumption, output, and comments on the mobile interface.

Real-time updates back to Business Central

After capturing information, it goes into Business Central in real time. If I open a production order, I can see routing status and progress—what’s in progress, what’s finished. It can be manually set to complete or automatically updated based on output or time.

I can drill into time and see who did the work, when they did it, how much time they put on it, and whether any time was rework time. In Business Central, you can also do additional reporting, like showing rework over a time frame, by production order, and see root cause codes. You can analyze time by work centers and drill into the details. Anything bold indicates there’s a comment associated with it.

Once posted, the information flows into normal Business Central posting results. The next time you run a schedule—MX APS or otherwise—you have real-time information detailing what was completed on the previous shift or day, and the schedule going forward can take that into account.

Time card approvals and posting

After time is entered, the next step is approvals. The approval step is optional, but ideally you have a lead hand or supervisor confirm people didn’t forget to clock out or enter something incorrectly. You can set up who reports to who, so when a supervisor logs in, they see time cards for their team.

In the approval view, anything in red means there’s a validation error. You can also show open cards, which includes time cards currently in progress. You can see issues like setup time required but not entered, or a time card with no runtime because someone forgot to clock off. The system can auto clock off at the end of shift, or a supervisor can edit the entry to correct it.

You can choose which validations you want to apply. If you don’t care about setup time, you can turn that validation off. The workflow is basically: look for anything red, review and fix if needed, then select everything and approve. With a team of 10, this is usually a quick two-to-five-minute task.

To post time, typically someone in the office filters down to approved time cards and hits post. That posts to projects, production orders, service orders, and everything else automatically.

Using Shop Floor time entry in the office

Shop Floor Insight can be used on the shop floor, but you can also use it inside the office. Salary personnel can record their time for the week to send to payroll. Engineering is a typical use case—engineers can record time against projects or production orders within Business Central without scanning barcodes on the shop floor.

Reporting and Power BI dashboard

For reporting, we provide a sample Power BI dashboard file you can implement as-is or tailor. It includes analysis like productivity, activity codes, and rework. You can drill down into root cause codes to understand what’s driving rework time.

You can also export to Excel and use pivot tables. For example, instead of looking at hours by production order, you could switch to work center or machine center and build an asset utilization report quickly. There was also a question about downtime reporting or OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). You can do OEE reporting using Business Central data (expected vs. actual), downtime reporting captured through Shop Floor, and reporting through Power BI, Business Central, or other tools.

Q&A highlights

There was a question about changing the bin an item is consuming from. By default, it uses the standard bin on the component lines. If you want more control, a typical approach is to use Warehouse Insight to pick from warehouse bins and move to a production bin, then consume from the production bin.

There was a question about planning and using tools, molds, and other constraints. Yes—MX APS can incorporate tooling, molds, and other constraints to ensure you’re not trying to run two orders that need the same tool at the same time.

What if two people are working on the same production order at the same time? No problem—each person has their own time card, so multiple people can clock into the same operation at the same time. If you wanted to prevent that, you could add custom Business Central logic to warn when someone is already clocked into an activity. Barcoding helps here because if you physically have the barcode on the pallet of WIP, you scan it and nobody else can scan it because you have it. With touchscreen selection, it’s easier for someone to select something that’s already active. The interface can show that an activity is active, and you can add a column to show who it’s active with.

How does this communicate with Business Central? For the kiosk barcode scanning interface, you install the local service and connect it to Business Central. The trial from AppSource isn’t everything—you need the installer from us or your partner. If you want to use the mobile interface, you can also use the Business Central role center approach directly without the kiosk interface.

Can break and lunch times be entered and adjusted automatically? Yes. You can handle breaks by having people clock off and on, which is useful if breaks are taken at random times. If you have fixed break times, you can set up shift calendars and have the system automatically deduct break time. If someone is clocked into a production order when lunch starts, they can walk off and come back, and the system will deduct the break time from whatever they were working on at the time of the break. You can define paid or unpaid breaks if you’re using payroll integration, and you can also set up schedules like rotating shifts and premiums (for example, a night shift premium). There are also rounding options, which can apply to payroll and to runtime capture.

Cost, ROI, and next steps

On cost, you can go to the website and figure out pricing, or talk to your partner to get actual pricing based on the number of employees. Once you’ve got that, there’s an ROI calculator on the website, and we can send you an Excel version so you can plug in your numbers and estimate the value you’ll get out of Shop Floor Insight.

If you have additional questions, go to shopfloor4dynamics.com, or come to the main website. You can chat with us, check out the knowledge base, and watch additional videos on Shop Floor and the other tools.

I ran a bit long, but thanks everybody for putting up with me for the extra time. I hope you have a good rest of the year, and we’ll be back with some more webinars next year. Thanks everybody—hope you have a good rest of the day and week.