Tennant Company
AutoTime Workforce Management System

Tennant Company Enhances Its Enterprise System with the “Most Flexible” Labor Management Solution and Improves its Manufacturing Operations

Motivated to streamline labor management and increase productivity, Tennant Company, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of surface maintenance equipment and coatings, decided to enhance their SAP enterprise system last year by integrating Kaba’s AutoTime 6 workforce optimization technology.

Challenges

The company, headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, has worldwide operations and required a highly flexible time and labor management system to accommodate its uniquely complex labor rules. Seamless integration into their existing SAP system, the ability to internally maintain changes including rules and evolving business needs, and the fact that the company’s previous time and attendance technology was outdated, were driving factors in the decision to go with Kaba’s AutoTime 6.

Senior Team Leader, Marlee Sander explained, “An accurate and reliable time tracking system was a key enabler to managing our labor pool. After an extensive selection process, we selected Kaba AutoTime 6 because it was the most flexible and robust of all the systems, and it could best support our ever changing business.”

The Answer to Complexity

Having 2500 employees at locations across the globe ranging from the United States to Asia, Latin America, Europe, Great Britain, the Middle East and beyond, Tennant’s primary goal was to find a system that had enough flexibility and user-friendliness to accommodate vastly different labor rules in its manufacturing plants. Specifically, for the facilities in the United States and the Netherlands AutoTime 6 was the ticket.

In addition to features such as self-maintenance, flexibility, and seamless SAP integration, AutoTime 6 also accommodated Tennant’s diverse production environments including repetitive manufacturing of commercial carpet-cleaning machines and discrete manufacturing of larger industrial application machines, welding, sheet-cutting and other raw materials. Three, and soon four, of the company’s manufacturing facilities in the United States and The Netherlands, have deployed or will be deploying AutoTime 6 for workforce management time and attendance, data collection, tracking, and reporting capabilities.

How It Works

Tennant employees simply clock into AutoTime 6 to track their time and attendance. Throughout the work day, they confirm production order operations, which are transferred to SAP in near-realtime as well as labor charged against internal orders or various types of indirect labor.

Because AutoTime 6 collects the cost center information according to where the employees performed their labor, employees can easily rotate between work centers without any maintenance to the master data. The individual timecard information is transferred to SAP for payroll processing and booked to the specific cost centers and labor accounts based on the data collected. Cost center managers and supervisors then immediately manage the workforce through a variety of labor distribution reports using the AutoTime 6 data.

AutoTime 6 Features

In a nutshell, AutoTime 6’s technology offered Tennant the following capabilities and functionality beyond any other workforce management tool — and all of these features were made available in one tool, optimizing the company’s workforce management practices and improving productivity.

The Return on Investment

Time and attendance tracking, production data, customized payroll rules, production schedules, employee self-service for vacation and shift information, and cost center reporting have all served to streamline the company’s operations so that supervisors spend significantly less time on administration and more on actual production management.

The ability to perform efficiency reporting by capturing actual vs. standard cost has released management from the tedious and time-consuming task of manual tracking. With a standardized time for every job, actual time is being automatically tracked and the data is delivered for immediate evaluation for things such as labor re-purposing or workflow changes, significantly reducing the chances of assignment errors. The amount of time spent by each supervisor reviewing and approving daily timecards has been slashed from one hour per day to just a few minutes, freeing the supervisors to focus on managing their work groups.

For more information, visit www.kaba-benzing-usa.com, and http://www.tennantco.com/.