Background
Most projects proceed in the following manner. Every month, the State publishes “the book,” which highlights the projects to be let that month. The company requests plans for jobs for which they may bid. Jack, Bob and Frank review the plans and at least one of them makes a site visit. The bids are then completed and submitted to the state. During the bid writing process, suppliers for various line items (concrete, steel, paving material, paint, etc.) are contacted for their prices. Since the suppliers are qualified by the state as well, this is a simple matter of calling up and asking for the unit price for the material. In fact, since the suppliers are privy to the same information as the contractors (as well as who has requested plans), they will often call up Wilco, with the total cost (unit cost and amount already calculated) for a line item on a particular job.
If Wilco is “low-bid” on a project, they assign a supervisor, who is responsible for the site administration. The supervisor (Jack, Bob, or Frank) takes a crew to a job site, and accomplishes the various tasks needed to complete the job over the few months that the project will run. The job site supervisor is the final authority on the administration of his particular job. The client will also assign an inspector (usually an administrator and/or an engineer) to the job site as well. Equipment and trucks are owned by the company, which can be moved to the various job sites by tractor and trailer. In some cases the job site supervisor needs a piece of equipment that is too specialized for the company to need on every job, hence equipment is sometimes rented.
Wilco Construction is an open shop, that is, employees may or may not belong to a craft or trade union. Jack and Bob believe that the decision to join a union should be up to the employee. The bulk of Wilco’s employees are not union, however, simply because there usually is not enough specialized work within one trade to keep any worker busy all of the time. The State mandates that all workers be paid a union scale per hour rate based on the skill classification for the job that they are doing at any given time. Consequently, there is no financial advantage to joining a union. The varying pay scales make for a complex payroll calculation. For instance, if a worker spends 2 hours as general labor ($11 per hour), 3 hours as a carpenter ($12 per hour), 1 hour in masonry work ($13 per hour), and 2 hours as a heavy equipment operator ($15 per hour) in a given day at a given job site, then their wage would be calculated by taking the amount they earned in each classification and summing those totals. In this instance the worker would gross $101 dollars for that day. Additionally, the wage scales can change from job to job (based on distance from the nearest union hall). For example, on a job 10 miles from a union hall, the union scale for an iron worker would be $14 per hour, while for a job 50 miles away from a union hall, the scale for an iron worker would be $15 per hour. The scale for each job is supplied by the state with the construction plans. Employees working on non-state projects (or at the shop) receive $10 per hour, regardless of job classification.
Wilco’s workers are extremely flexible, and move from skill to skill and job site to job site on a daily, even hourly basis. The only constant at a given job is the job site supervisor. For example, last week when Frank’s crew was getting ready for a big bridge deck pour, Jack spared a few of his workers to help out, as his project was temporarily delayed (heavy rain had flooded a footer hole, which had to be pumped out before work could proceed). Consequently, a worker may have worked at multiple sites, in up to 5 skill classifications (general labor, carpentry, masonry, ironwork, and equipment operation), in any given week. All of this has to be taken into account to generate a payroll statement. The job site supervisor is responsible for keeping track of most of the movement of employees from job to job and site to site, however, trusted employees who have been with Wilco for several years keep their own time cards. At any rate, all information relevant to payroll eventually gets turned into Mary.
Recently, employment equity legislation has also become an issue in the construction industry. Currently, legislation dictates that employers use certain percentages of visible minorities and women for each job skill classification on each job. A report stating how many hours (on each job, in each skill classification) were worked by women and visible minorities has to be sent to the Ohio Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) every two weeks to demonstrate compliance. Currently, 10 per cent of all hours in each skill classification at each job (although the wages are not consistent across jobs, the skill classifications are) have to be worked by a woman or visible minority to be in compliance with the regulation. Failure to comply could mean that Wilco would be stripped of its qualification, making it ineligible to bid on state contracts. In addition, as governments change, the legislation changes, and hence the reporting requirements change as well.
Project
As a group we gathered the project requirements:
- Meeting requirements for state of Ohio Hwy Division
- User friendly interface
- Availability of time care on construction site
- Quick log for employees and job functions
- Real time alerts of EEOC compliance
- Time to finish was 3 months
First we need to make a Data Flow Diagram to help give us an understanding of how data is used for Wilco Construction. I used Microsoft Visio to create this diagram.
The next process we needed to make a database using Microsoft Access and created a Entity Relationship Diagram. As you can see the many connections through the 15 tables we have created.
After that we created a form for the “Employee Entry Form”
By this time we were already almost finished with our project. We created a Work Flow Diagram to show the procedure how the time card would work on this remote check in.
This is our prototype of Wilco time card entry which is also simple and user friendly interface. We used Microsoft Visual programming C# to create this time entry system.
If for some reason a worker has forgotten his card he can ask the manager to help sign them in. It will also let the users switch to different jobs that they are capable of doing for a different wage.
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