Act-in has its customers in the manufacturing industry. Act-in helps these customers optimize their production process through their software packages. In optimizing, think of making production more sustainable, making maximum use of resources and increasing production capacity.
“Act-in is active in the market with three packages for MES Software. These are aimed at optimizing the production of industrial companies. The software packages help companies get the most out of people, machines and raw materials. In that sense it is a bit like what Timewax does, but at production level,” says Dominique Clumpkens, project manager at Act-In.”
As a project manager, Dominique acts as a bridge between the Software engineers and the customer. He is responsible for communication and clear agreements between both parties. He is also responsible for setting deadlines and maintaining a good production process.
We used to do the administration in Excel. At the time, this was still done in fairly rough steps, with the process starting with the question of what the customer wants. If that wish was known, we would process it in our software. Then we tested it and then put it live. So, simply put, we worked with four steps in the process – request – processing – testing – going live. These four steps often took dozens of hours, if not more, per step. These steps were then outlined in the Excel sheet.
At that time, planning was done at project level. The problem arose that at the end of the story you would have exceeded the budget. It was then a matter of guessing the cause! Where did we take too long and where did we outperform? Why do we have that time left? Putting your finger on the sore spot or making adjustments was virtually impossible at that time. In the long run this was no longer workable for us.
The request to purchase Timewax came from me because I felt that we lacked an overview of the planned projects and when they will be completed. After a demo for management, we quickly decided that this is what we wanted. Our work was still too ad hoc; when task one was finished, we picked up task two and so on. I quickly came to the conclusion that other software was needed to break down the tasks at a much more granular level. The process had to be developed in a much more detailed manner. With Timewax this is now possible.
However, the most important reason why Act-in chose Timewax is because we also work with AFAS. Timewax’s software is one of the few planning systems that can be integrated with AFAS. That’s where my search started. Which planning software is compatible with AFAS? That condition was the most important for us, a two-way sybc with the AFAS system, so that we did not have to enter everything twice, as in our Excel past. This would be at the expense of efficiency. The software therefore had to fit into the existing business process and not the other way around.
“At the moment I would mainly like to mention working in more detail. To illustrate this: for us, the engineering task is no longer one step or one block of 100 hours, so to speak. This process is now divided into ten or fifteen small steps. This makes it much easier for us to track where we are in terms of hours because you can view these as a specific task in Timewax.”
“Timewax allows us to check for a specific task whether an excess of hours has occurred, where it came from and where fewer hours have been used. Information that you would also like to know for future calculations. This way we get as close to the truth as possible. Valuable insights that have improved our entire process.”
“Then there is a third part of the Timewax software that has a beneficial impact on our company and that is that the entire process has become much more transparent for everyone involved. To take the engineers as an example. They can now see for themselves how many hours they can work on a task. They can also see how many hours we have calculated in advance. The advantage of this involvement is that, for example, if a job is completed earlier than the calculated value, the remaining time can be shifted to other tasks or saved. In this way, the engineers are actively involved in time management at project level. This also places more responsibility on themselves. It gives them some ownership. This benefits the entire business process.”
“In the future, we would like to make many parts of the process even more specific, such as tracking the progress of tasks. We want to monitor progress much more in the meantime and also use the data available in AFAS. Timewax has a progress percentage at task level, which we do not yet use sufficiently.
“As a company, we want to go one step deeper at an analytical level. If you know that a certain task in the process can take you 10 hours, then you know that you have to be halfway to 50%. If you are not, then you know that the rest will also run late. By carefully monitoring this in the meantime, you can respond to differences earlier so that you can correct them during the production process. We want to work more towards this, but the first major steps have already been taken by using the Timewax software!”
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