David Teague

Historical Arts and Casting

Salt Lake City, Utah

"Pendragon Forms has helped me make our company's handheld PDA's more useful than our management thought possible...and there is more to come." 

Historical Arts and Casting designs and manufactures custom ornamental metalwork.  Each item is unique and requires designers, architects, engineers, foundry workers, fabricators, painters and project managers.

Accurate job costing for these custom projects requires detailed tracking of time and materials.  Project managers work on as many as 10 projects at a time, and can switch tasks 30 times each day.  At the end of the day, managers completed daily paper time sheets and estimated the time spent on each project. For each pay period, payroll personnel transcribed the paper time sheets into the job tracking system. 

Collecting information was time consuming, laborious and imprecise.

Forms Development Time:

Designing the "time card" form took less than an hour;  a prototype was ready the same day that the software was purchased.

Installation:

David Teague developed a form that he uses as a punch card when moving from one project to another during the work day.  Time punches are assigned to a job using a look-up list that is automatically updated from an Access job costing database. 

After using this form to collect 2800 punches in one year, the Pendragon Forms solution was deployed to eight other managers.  New users required about one week to adjust to recording data on a handheld, and to change from tracking task changes as they occur instead of at the end of the day.

In the first two week period, nine managers recorded more than 500 time punches.  The task of tracking time which used to be a separate, dreaded and subjective activity, has been integrated into the work day. 

A second job costing application is being tested that tracks the use of general supplies like nuts and bolts, that are not purchased specifically for a project.  Instead of writing down the item and job code on a piece of paper when supplies were used for a job, inventory managers can now quickly scan the bar code and assign a job code from the same look-up list that is used for time tracking.

Benefits:

• Eliminated the need to re-type time sheets from nine managers.
• Increased accuracy.
• Managers tend to stay on task, and are not as easily distracted.
• Objective comparison of manger performance data.