Austrian shop and interior designer seeks assembly planning and mobile time recording software

We are a company in the shopfitting and interior design industry and are looking for planning software or mobile time recording software for the assembly sector. The objective for stage 1 is to optimize the assembly planning process and the entire assembly handling process in terms of reducing effort, transparency, timeliness, and data consistency. In stage 1, the following areas in particular are to be supported and the following objectives achieved:

- System-supported assembly planning

- Digitization of assembly planning

- Reduction of personnel planning effort

- Reduction of invoice control (use of credit note procedure)

- Reduction of effort in the area of time recording

“Assembly” is understood here to mean, in particular, outdoor assembly on site at the customer's construction sites. The “manual planning boards” currently in use must be completely replaced and a digital alternative integrated into existing systems must be established.

We have the following requirements for the software:

Capacity planning taking into account

• Operating calendar / location-specific holidays
• 5- or 4-day week (depending on the workload situation, among other things)
• Planned absences
• Illness
• Internal activities
• Comparison with route planning from ERP
• “Arrival list” goods/person Coordinated shipping/assembly planning
• Ordering of external assembly services
• Room reservation

Assembly planning should be possible for the following (person) groups

• Planning for individuals
• Planning for “temporary” assembly teams
• Planning for external assembly partners
• Planning for mixed teams (company supervisor + external assembly company)
• It must be possible to “lend” employees from one company to another or from one location to another.

It should be possible to use mobile assembly time recording for the following (person) groups

• Planning for individuals
• Planning for “temporary” assembly teams
• Planning for external assembly partners
• Assembly activities
• Travel times
• Working hours / breaks - Downtime due to disruptions (lack of construction sites, lack of materials, waiting times, creditor-specific surcharges (overtime, Saturday work, Sunday and holiday surcharges, etc.), reasons for disruptions should be definable
• Absences (vacation, illness, training, etc.)
• Internal activities
• Allowances/per diems (expenses?)
• Mileage

Statistics and key figures

• Capacity utilization diagrams/displays, ongoing displays of capacity utilization situations for
• Individual employees
• Assembly teams
• External assembly partners or companies
• “Warning notices” in the event of overload of the corresponding units
• Display of “underload” of the individual units
• Transfer of data to MS Excel or other evaluation systems
• Target/actual comparison
• Ongoing target/actual comparisons for the individual ongoing assembly orders with a warning system in the event of
• foreseeable deadline/time overruns

“Office” functions

• Hotel reservations
• Communication support
• Easy transfer of information (photos, drawings, emails, texts, acceptance reports, time sheets, etc.) from/to the software
• Easy transfer of information (photos, drawings, emails, texts, etc.) from/to the software
• Creation/printing of assembly reports
• In one expansion stage, digital assembly reports, etc. are to be created/printed on site at the customer's premises. It should be possible to have the documents signed in digital form.

Offline operation

• All functions that are performed on site at the construction site must also be possible in offline mode. This applies in particular to: Assembly time recording (logging in/out of individual activities Access to order information Once a suitable connection is available (e.g., hotel, etc.), the data should be updated bidirectionally

Basic system operation - Presentation or fact sheet of the essential system and software components such as operating system(s), database(s)

Security, backup, recovery - Presentation of the corresponding procedures on the part of the provider

Interfaces

• Order transfer from the ERP system or an upstream order system
• Order updates from the ERP system / an upstream order system
• Presence/absence data from and to the production data acquisition system
• Start/end times or duration to the production data acquisition system

Order transfer from the ERP system - the following data in particular is transferred from the ERP system to assembly planning

• Basic order data (order number, description, customer, customer name, etc.)
• Assembly start/end date
• Assembly information (costs, number of fitters, additional information, etc.)
• Type of delivery (direct delivery, by us, pickup at location xy)
• Stored customer contact persons
• Further interfaces to be clarified

Foreign language skills (German, English, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, etc.)

Multi-client capability (the individual legal entities of our company should be represented as “independent” clients - Locations (= multiple locations within the clients)

With regard to system adjustments, the software should be configurable for the requirements at the level of the individual locations and companies

The interfaces to/from the planning software should be able to be created/adjusted by us ourselves after appropriate training; Reports/evaluations should be able to be created/adjusted by us ourselves after appropriate training

Volume structure - the system is to be used in the assembly area in approx. 3-4 clients over the next few years. The number of assembly orders in the individual clients varies greatly; the following values refer to the client with the highest number of assembly orders at present (approx. values)

• Processing of assembly orders per year: approx. 4000 - 4500
• Processing of simultaneous orders: 60–70
• Number of assembly teams deployed (to be planned): 40–50
• Number of personnel deployed (to be planned): 140–180
• Number of external assembly teams/external assembly companies: 30–40
• Approximate turnaround time for installations: 1–5 days

To summarize briefly: Support for planning customer installation orders and handling all aspects of external installation (hotel bookings, acceptance reports, etc.). It should be possible to schedule both individual personnel and installation teams. Mobile time recording for fitters (including time recording for entire teams) on customer construction sites should be possible. In addition, communication between “head office” and fitters on the construction site should be supported.

In the pilot project, approximately 2 to 3 planning workstations and approximately 20 to 30 mobile time recording devices are to be implemented. A gradual rollout to our other companies and locations is then planned for the coming years. Licenses are also to be issued to external installation companies with predefined authorizations.

Note from SoftGuide: A document detailing the “rough requirements” can be requested from SoftGuide if necessary.