Keeping track of employee time
May 1st 2011

Vaillant Group's Belper operation relies on realtime work information from Kronos to drive efficiency and improve productivity at the plant – from HR and payroll to logistics, assembly, manufacturing and maintenance

With approximately 13,000 employees and a sales turnover of around €2.44bn, the Vaillant Group develops and manufactures heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and heating technology products throughout Europe and sells them in more than 80 countries.

The final assembly plant at Belper in Derbyshire is a highly efficient plant, with domestic boiler production in 2008, 2009 and 2010 surpassing its annual production record of more than 400,000 units – and still growing. The site is recognised as a Centre of Manufacturing Excellence and has the renowned 'Quality Management System' to BS EN ISO 9001:2000.

Allan Harley, continuous improvement manager at Vaillant Group, explains: "What started as a system to monitor employee working time for payroll purposes has evolved into one of the platforms for ensuring that the plant is run at optimum efficiency.We rely 100% on two core systems at Belper to drive efficiency, maintain margin and increase productivity – Kronos and SAP." Operating lean manufacturing practices as part of its continuous improvement programme is helping the company overcome the challenges in the domestic heating market – where the overall market was down by 5% in 2009, yet Vaillant Group's UK sales volumes and market share were up. In every area, the business requires employees to be working in the most efficient way possible to meet increased demand for boilers, without compromising quality or increasing costs.

"Keeping a real-time track of employee time is vital to managing your workforce effectively," says Allan Harley. "Without a sound workforce management system you could be wasting time and money and missing opportunities to improve your bottom line. Knowing where everyone is and what they are doing is essential.

With Kronos we could potentially monitor shop floor activity on a minute-by-minute basis." Vaillant Group operates with a Just in Time inventory strategy, with average stock held for just 12 to14 days. Boilers are made to order, rather than for stock.Each one consists of 150+ separate parts, some of which are produced on site, so it's imperative that component parts are readily available. This means that procurement staff need to be available to purchase stock, and logistics staff available to warehouse it and deliver it to the shop floor.

Kronos forecasts and highlights any gaps in staff availability to ensure that there are never any hold-ups or bottle necks in the supply chain.

The plant operates a Total Planned Maintenance policy, with regular, planned maintenance of machinery to avoid unnecessary downtime and reduced production. Kronos is used to ensure that maintenance staff are always available when required.

Vaillant Group believes that understanding the true cost of production is only possible when you are in a position to understand the amount of time and materials that directly contribute to the production of the end product. It uses Kronos to monitor all employee activities on the shop floor to better understand the amount of direct and indirect time worked. When employees are not directly working on boiler assembly, they are required to log their working time against a variety of pre-set codes, which include such things as, union meetings, waiting for parts, health and safety briefings, machine down time and waiting for maintenance.

Allan Harley explains: "All nonproductive time means fewer boilers off the production line, so it's imperative that we know where the time goes.With Kronos there's no guesswork around 'lost' time and as a result we can analyse the lost hours and work hard to reduce them, so continuously improving processes at the plant, driving efficiencies and increasing production capacity.

Using Kronos we've identified previously unaccounted for training time and downtime due to supplier problems and successfully addressed these and other issues."

More articles from Vaillant Ltd: