Mobile Timesheet Recording (Bailey Rail & Kailaz Software)

Submitted: 27 March 2008

Overview
Process: Mobile Timesheet Recording
Users: Bailey Rail
Hardware: Mobile phone
Software: MobiBiz
Location: Nationwide
Costs: See Outcomes
ROI: Not estimated

Business problem

Industry background
Bailey Rail is a rail maintenance contractor based in Manchester. They provide a range of electrical, mechanical and communications services across the UK. They employ a highly itinerant staff, working on diverse projects, ranging from scheduled and reactive maintenance to longer term projects, and at discrete sites or on longer sections of track.

The business problem being tackled
Accurate records of staff time on different projects are needed for payment of salaries, and for accounting and project planning purposes. Staff based at a single location use a time recording system which uses a fixed swipe card box. Where staff work on a number of different projects, at different sites, it can be difficult to maintain accurate records of their travelling and working hours. This can impact on the ability to pay staff appropriately, to schedule work, and to manage costs within maintenance contracts.

The original process
Attendance data is either passed back informally by telephone to a project manager, or paper timesheets are used. The project manager allocates time to project cost codes and checks that salaries allowances (e.g. for overnight stay) are correct. An electronic timesheet is completed by the project manager, and this information is then passed to salaries so staff are paid correctly.

The limitations to the existing process are a lack of accurate data of actual attendance on site, late submission of attendance data, and unnecessary effort from employees and managers in recording and collating this data. At present, the process relies heavily on the project manager keeping track of his staff, and manually collating data. This works well for small, tightly-knit project teams, but can be problematic for larger, more disparate teams, or when the project manager is temporarily absent. In addition, the lack of objective attendance data, and integration with other systems, limits the ability to manage costs and improve processes.

To address the above problem, Bailey Rail were looking for an easy to use, portable, cost-effective solution. This would need to collect objective attendance data from a highly mobile workforce, and integrate this data with back-office systems.

New solution

Process change
The new process involves deploying an application on the employees' mobile phones. On arriving or leaving a site, an employee logs this on their phone which sends the timestamp, verified by location to a backend hosted server. The input process itself on the phone is very simple, the user merely choosing 'arrive on site', 'leave site', etc. and then inserting the name of the site or choosing from a self-populating list.

The project manager then has access to this processed data on the backend website. Data can be displayed according to employee, site, day/week/month; and viewed in a normal or "payroll" view. Once certified as accurate, the project manager can make any necessary adjustments. The payroll data can then be downloaded in Excel or exported via XML straight into backend processes including payroll.

The potential advantages of the new system are more complete and accurate attendance data, elimination of duplicated paperwork, and integration of data with other company systems. In addition, it is possible to collect historical / management information for audit and process improvement purposes.

Software and hardware A core aim of the project was to develop a simple, low cost solution that did not need additional hardware - making it accessible to smaller enterprises. The application is handset 'agnostic', working on any mobile phone, and the backend system is SAAS that can be accessed from any internet browser.

There are several benefits to using mobile phones as data input devices:

Implementation

Business process analysis
The project undertook little analysis from a business process perspective, and this caused several problems which are described in 'Main Issues Arising'.

Technological development
Little technological development was needed as it was a new application of existing technologies: a combination of mobile phone applications, HTTP wireless protocol data transfer and mobile Location Based Services (LBS). The application was adapted in order to make it more familiar to the construction industry end users.

End user involvement
End users looked at the raw product at an early stage before piloting. Their input resulted in a simplification of the client side, to make it less complex and more intuitive. Their involvement at a later halfway review stage resulted in several amendments, including redesign of the forms into a more familiar format, the ability to adjust times for job allocation, and supervisor mode for 'clocking in' to eliminate the need for each individual to do this.

Training
A brief session with on-phone support was sufficient for the simple training of the handset usage. Additional time over an afternoon at the Bailey Rail offices in Manchester was spent to train project managers on the use of the back end system.

Rollout
A Manchester contract team initially used the mobile application for a couple of months. Back office staff (project manager and coordinator) then used the backend software. The project was championed by Jill Bottomley, Business Systems Manager at NG Bailey, and Oliver Rosenberg, Business Development Director at Kailaz Software.

Outcomes

Outcomes
It was not possible to quantify many of the outcomes due to the limited scale of the project. However - see below:

Time
Time savings were primarily centred on the back end processes where timesheets were collated, analysed/checked and processed. These were used for contract costing verification. The contract engineers spent additional time inputting timesheet data (since the contract team were not currently providing this data). It is estimated that each engineer would have spent about 30 seconds per entry, with up to 20 entries per day.

Costs
The hardware costs were zero, since the application ran on mobile phones that the engineers already had. Alternatively, standard issue company mobile phones could be used. The software was provided free of charge by Kailaz, but commercial costs would be of the order of £10 per user per month for non-GPS phones and £5 per user per month for GPS phones.

Quality The limited scale of the project meant it was not possible to measure quality improvements. However, the application potentially increases the accuracy of employee, job and location recording and speeds the transfer of data between sites and headquarters. If submitted data can be verified, it can then feed directly into other software (e.g, payroll, HR, project management etc).

End user impact
The initial impact on the end users (e.g. electricians, site supervisors) was that 'clocking in' required extra effort and it undermined the element of trust within project teams. Due to the highly mobile nature of the contract teams, up to 20 entries were needed per day. When a 'supervisor' mode was introduced (enabling a supervisor to 'clock in' all or part of a team), the effort required by individuals to use the system reduced.

The project manager initially felt the application created extra work, without generating added business value. However, at the early stages, he was not deriving benefit from the data, because he was not using the back-office system. Previously, maintenance engineers had not completed timesheets in the field. The use of the system meant that for the first time accurate attendance data were being recorded. This was useful data, and aided accountability. A knock-on benefit was that an auditable database of working times was produced that could be potentially used for project management and planning purposes.

Main Issues arising

An initial lack of user awareness
An initial meeting was held involving end users and the IT developers. After this meeting, the end users came away with the impression that the mobile timesheet solution would link directly to the calculation and payment of wages. This created concern over impact on pay, and resistance, as workforce wages were based on a range of factors and allowances, over and above clocking in and travelling times.

User effort and perceived value
The introduction of a mobile timesheets solution required additional personal effort from the end users as they were not currently required to complete on-the-job timesheets. There was little, if any, obvious direct benefit to those end users, and the wider benefits of this data within the organisation were not initially demonstrated. The end users perceived the solution as requiring effort (from them and their project manager), without adding value. It is important to note that end user resistance would have been far less in a team that were already used to some sort of time/attendance timesheet accountability.

The complexities of the process
The calculation of salaries from timesheet data has to take into account complex working agreements with the Union. These include allowances for travel out of area, overnight stays etc. Rather than strict rules that could be incorporated into software, there proved to be multiple 'exceptions' which were incorporated on an individual basis. This meant that the direct impact of the timesheet system was reduced.

Conflicts with working culture
The working culture was one of tightly-knit, trusted and relatively autonomous work teams, where project managers knew where staff were, because they had sent them there directly. The concept of direct supervision and personnel 'tracking' therefore conflicted with the organisational structure and team values. This caused some resentment, since the 'tracking' capability was seen as questioning the integrity of the workforce.

Interface design
The project managers were very familiar with existing attendance data sheets that were generated internally, and were able to quickly and accurately extract the information they needed from these sheets. The design of the back-office system that managed the data collected from the mobile phones was initially visually very different to these sheets. When the back office system was redesigned to resemble existing forms, it was much easier to use and more readily accepted. In particular, the payroll view and the exported excel timesheets were made extremely customisable so they could be designed with similar fields to the existing paper timesheets.

Key lessons to take forward

Set the objectives of the project out clearly prior to starting - for both the software provider and the customer. Be clear whether the intention is to tackle specific objectives, or to take a smaller scale, more informal pilot project approach.

Be focussed but flexible. If the customer's business practices and processes are changing, then the scope of any new software development may also need to change.

Choose your demonstration sites carefully. New IT solutions will be better suited to some sites/project teams than others. If possible, choose sites based on the potential impact, rather than availability.

Make sure you do an analysis of the existing business process so you understand exactly where and how new technology will add value. Identify the extent to which IT is replacing existing tools, or introducing new tasks.

Identify how IT solutions will interface with existing IT and paper-based systems. For example, do other related business processes mean that the data from new IT solutions will need to be re-entered or reformatted?

Understand how teams work, and make sure technology supports those teams. Identify the values that are important in those teams (eg autonomy, self-reliance, trust) and make sure IT solutions support those core values and working relationships.

Ensure that misunderstandings do not arise when new technology is first discussed within the company. It is easy for those impacted by new technology to form misconceptions Make sure that all the users are clear about what process it will improve, and how it fits with existing processes.

Take advantage of familiarity with existing tools (which may be paper-based). If electronic forms are needed, consider whether these can be designed to resemble existing paper-based forms. This will increase user acceptance and reduce new training requirements.

The case study did show that mobile phones with applications can be used as a business tool in a way that previously would have relied upon a more conventional device such as a PDA. The low cost of phone-based applications, and developments in phone hardware enable a wide range of companies to benefit from mobile IT. In addition, since users are familiar with mobile phones, end user acceptance is increased, and barriers to entry are reduced. If phone-based applications can add demonstrable business value, they can be readily adopted by a mobile workforce.

Next steps

Bailey Rail are currently rolling out Ganetime time recording to their staff and whilst this doesn't address the major needs of the mobile workforce it does provide many of the (secondary) benefits of this product. Once the process has been proven there is a further opportunity to look at Mobibiz purely as an input mechanism into Ganetime.

Kailaz are continuing to research and develop low cost phone-based IT applications. These offer the potential to lower the barrier to entry into mobile IT for SMEs within the construction industry, and other commercial sectors.

Contacts and further information

To download a copy of the case study PDF, please CLICK HERE.

The client was Bailey Rail:
Jill Bottomley, Business Systems Manager,
NG Bailey
01274 682856
jill.bottomley@ngbailey.co.uk
www.ngbailey.com

The software was developed and implemented by Kailaz Software:
Rosanna Da Costa, Marketing and Business Development Manager,
Kailaz Software Ltd
0208 233 2809
rosanna@kailaz.com
www.mobibizlive.com

This report was written by Andrew May a.j.may@lboro.ac.uk, (Ergonomics and Safety Research Institute, Loughborough University), Oliver Rosenberg and Rosanna Da Costa (Kailaz), and Jill Bottomley (NG Bailey).