Before Solutions360, Spinitar lacked visibility into labor utilization rates, or the percentage of billable hours that employees worked. From an operational efficiency perspective, the company wanted to improve the way it managed its labor pool. Today, with the Solutions360 software platform, Spinitar is able to optimize resource utilization, and do more with less.
We spoke with Jay Rogina, Principal at Spinitar, about how the company’s focus on billable hours helped to increase margins.
Prior to Solutions360, employees were already posting their hours, but the data wasn’t live, “We found out people weren’t always posting their time, and there was a lot of guess work involved – I think I spent 6 hours here, I might have spent 2 there – this just doesn’t prove to be accurate,” says Rogina.
“Today, everybody books their time, every day. If there are 40 hours in a week, you make sure you have 40 hours. This brings accuracy into the system on the earn side,” Rogina reports.
Spinitar tracks 3 different categories of time:
- Billable time. This is how much time people are working on projects. From an hourly perspective our reporting gives us designer time, project management time, foreman time, installation time, all the way through to our billable productivity. These are key factors when it comes to an 8 hour day – what are the people doing and what are they working on.
- Opportunity time. This represents how much time people are spending on the front end of a project through the sales and quotation stages. We are able to track what time and resources are needed as far as people go.
- On-the-bench. What do you do when you have under-utilized resources that can’t be billable or productive? The answer is resource sharing. One of Spinitar’s big initiatives in 2018 is to set up a global calendar within Q360, for all offices, installers and technicians. That way if a resource is not going to be busy for a week, that person can be used somewhere else. The global calendar will allow Spinitar to better anticipate staffing needs and make critical staffing decisions in a proactive, rather than reactive, manner.
“Solutions360 helps us account for every billable hour, which immediately increased our bottom line.”
Tightening up time tracking processes means that every hour someone is paid is documented, and it is transparent to everyone. Analyzing this data has increased Spinitar’s understanding of labor usage rates.
“Now we know how much we spend on labor every day as long as people are posting, which is the challenge we had early on,” notes Rogina. “If they don’t post their time, the rest of the data is no good, so getting the data entered as quickly and accurately as possible is key. Once that’s in you know right where you stand on a project, and where you have to go.”
As an added benefit, the increased understanding of labor utilization has translated into improved accuracy for job costing and preparing quotes.
“The visibility and the reporting structure of Solutions360 has driven us to look at metrics that we’ve never been able to look at before. The data just wasn’t available to us,” says Rogina.
It has been almost six years since their Go Live date, yet Spinitar keeps learning from the data, “We continue to gain ground, and keep getting closer on our numbers. That’s a huge win for us.”
“The Solutions360 team is very visionary in updating the software to make it better,” Rogina concludes.
If you would like to learn more about how Solutions360 can help you increase margins, contact us or book your demo today.
