Modern Transport Engineers: from a time clock to a live shop floor

MTE builds custom heavy transport trailers, with workshops across the North Island. The accounting, payroll and workshop time-clock systems were all heading for end of life.

The time clock told them who was in the building. It said nothing about which job someone was on, or whether that job was on track. Managers found out how many hours a build had taken after it was finished, when there was nothing left to fix.

Historically we had to wait until the end of the builds to see how many hours we'd spent on a project. At that stage we weren't able to address issues during production.

Sharp NZ has looked after MTE's printing for years. While talking printers, MTE mentioned the ageing payroll and time-clock problem, and Sharp introduced us.

From there Bridge Point took the project: working out how the workshops actually run, designing the system, building it, and looking after it since.

A workshop management platform, written for MTE's production process. Staff clock on at a touchscreen kiosk, pick the job and the task, and update the stage through the day.

That one stream of data drives everything else: job and task tracking, workforce tracking, cost tracking, live reporting, and payroll and accounting. One system, one source of truth, built and run by us.

Sharp supplied the commercial screens the dashboards show on.

• Job and task tracking, down to the stage each job is at
• Workforce tracking: who is on what, across every workshop
• Cost tracking as the hours build up, job by job
• Thorough, live reporting for managers and supervisors
• Touchscreen kiosk clock-on, payroll and accounting integration
• A 12-month pilot, and ongoing development after rollout

We didn't roll it out everywhere on day one. One workshop became the test bed. Workflows, reports and the kiosk screens were changed again and again, based on what the people on the tools said.

By the time it went wider, it had already been through a year of real use. It also went live before the old payroll system ran out.

Working with BridgePoint and Sharp has been an excellent process. It's been quite a collaborative effort... we've all been able to come to the table with different ideas and do a lot of testing to work out what actually works for us.

The business now runs on live data. Managers see job progress, workloads and cost while a job is still running, so they move work between people and catch bottlenecks early. MTE's IT Manager, Shaun Clarkin, puts the production gain at at least 30%.

The system is still being developed as MTE's needs change.