This document describes how to address a situation where some shop floor employees “lose” their time cards when these employees go to log off their shift.

SCENARIO: “Joey’s Toy Shop” has recently hired some employees that have longer shifts than the others. These employees log into Shop Floor Insight at the beginning of their shift, work throughout the day and only log into Shop Floor Insight to clock off at the end of their day.

ISSUE: The employees have noticed that when they go to clock off at the end of their shift, the time card they had open in the morning is now closed and no longer visible to them. The other employees with “normal” shifts do not have this issue.

One common cause of this issue is related to the “Hours before Close” setting found in the “Shop Floor Setup” page.

“Hours Before Close” is a setting that specifies the number of hours a time card can be inactive before a new one is automatically created the next time the user clocks in. “Inactive” in this context means the employee does not log back into Shop Floor Insight.

• Search for “Shop Floor Setup”

• In the top “General” section, notice there is a field called “Hours before Close”.

If the value of the setting is set to 11 hours, and an employee clocks in at the beginning of her shift, if the shift lasts less than 11 hours, the next time she scans her employee badge to clock off, the time card will still be open.

However, if her shift lasts more than the value defined in this setting (11h in this example), when she attempts to clock off after a 12 hour shift, she will notice that her time card she initiated in the morning is no longer open for her and she cannot see it in Shop Floor Insight.

This is because there was no activity for 11 hours or more.

If the same employee had logged into Shop Floor Insight during her shift and done nothing else, at the end of her 12-hour shift, the same time card would still be visible to her.

In this scenario, if the Shop Floor employees only clock in/out at the beginning/end of their shift, a solution to prevent the time card from closing automatically is to increase the value of the “Hours before Close” setting. This will prevent the time card from closing after a long period of inactivity. A value of 13 hours would ensure that anyone working shifts of 12 hours will not have their time card automatically closed.

However, the value also needs to be less than the amount of time that normally elapses between the same shifts. In other words, the inactivity period specified should not be too high, otherwise if any employee works late one night, and comes in early the next day, the same time card might still be open.   

• Increase the value set in “Hours Before Close” to a value higher than the longest shift. In this example, since no one has a shift that lasts longer than 12 hours, a value of 13 will work.

As mentioned above, the value specified in this setting should not be too high in order to allow the time cards to close automatically.

• Close the page and ensure the scanning stations have their Shop Floor Insight page refreshed.  

 REMINDERS:

• • Ideally, Shop Floor employees should be using the scanning stations to clock in on the various production orders, jobs and/or activities they work on throughout their work day. It takes very little time to do so, and it isn’t ideal to simply clock in when the shift starts and clock off once the shift is over with nothing recorded in between.
  • Employees can always manually “End Shift” in Shop Floor Insight. See the button in the top left. Ending the shift manually will close the time card, and the next time the employee logs back in, a new time card will be created.
  • It is also possible for supervisors to close time cards of their employees at any point directly in Business Central.