Closing the gap between estimated hours and actual hours
Job costing only works if the times going in are real. Operators write setup and run in pen on the traveller and a clerk keys the sheet on Friday, so the numbers land rounded to the half hour and attached to whichever operation was easiest to find. Scrap gets logged late or never. The comparison people need is by operation and by part family, not by job, because the setup standard is what gets copied into the next quote. Cycle time from the control can anchor the run side.
The quote was built against one revision and the drawing in the operator hand is another, which is the defect this sector is built around.
A request to quote arrives as an archive of geometry files and drawings, or as a line in a customer portal, or as a scan. An estimator opens each one, decomposes the part into operations mentally, estimates setup and run times, and emails suppliers for material pricing before typing a number into a spreadsheet.
- JobBOSS2
- MachineMetrics
- Excel
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if nobody clocks to operations at all. A comparison needs two sides, and a shop where labour goes to the job in one lump can only learn that the job lost money, never which operation lost it. Getting operation level punches in place is the real project, and it starts on the floor.
The constraint that shapes it
Quality certification is the constraint that shapes everything here. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- How do I compare estimated setup time to actual by operation?
- Why does my job costing report say every job made money?
- How do I feed real run times back into the next quote?
- What is a realistic setup standard for a new part family?
- Why do handwritten shop floor times never match machine cycle data?
Back to manufacturing, or see how this is priced and scoped.