Do you know exactly how much money you’re making—or losing—on every job?

Welcome to Reel Talk, featuring job costing in Steelhead. Reliable Margin Data that helps you catch any problems before they chip away at your profits.

How are you managing job costing today? 

  • Do you have difficulty tracking labor data in real time?
  • Is it hard to get inventory and outsourcing costs into your margins?
  • Are your cost calculations buried in paperwork and spreadsheets?

Now, imagine the impact of easily seeing exactly where you’re making—or losing—money. That’s what you get with automated, fully reliable job costing in Steelhead:

  • Timers auto start and stop, and detailed data is collected for you
  • The all-in-one system means seamless tracking of costs and operations at every stage
  • Full visibility into instant, granular margin data provides a complete view of every dollar

Let’s log in to Steelhead’s digital production floor and see how it transforms your profitability.

As an operator on the plant floor, I’m opening up my daily to-do list here, I’m working in the prep station. You’d have several jobs in ready for prep, but for this demo, we have just one job. 

I have the parts in front of me ready to go, so I swipe in steelhead and get to work, masking and plugging this JC-MP113. 

Opening up the job details, the timer automatically starts the moment you swipe...

When I’m done prepping these parts, I can click Deplete to mark down the amount of tape I used for this job, let’s say 10 feet of tape…then deplete plugs…15 plugs for these parts. 

And finishing Prep, let’s send the parts on to the next station. You can see here, these parts are going to Ready for Racking.

I don’t have to remember to end the timer because when I move these parts, the timer automatically stops. 

Now viewing the Racking workboard, the top priority job will be at the top of my to do list, I’ll swipe when I’m ready to start racking, and a timer is started in the background. 

As the operator, I can either log out or turn off my tablet while I work, and when I’m done racking, I come back in here, to the racking workboard, and swipe those parts to the next station. 

Now our parts are in Ready for Coating. Swipe to start Coating and the timer runs automatically. 

Once Coating is done, you can swipe to the next station, but let’s open this job so you can see the timer ticking.

Click Move Parts if you want to see details, and click move to confirm and let’s go to the Inspection workboard.

As the inspector, when I’m ready to start inspecting these parts, I just swipe em into Inspection. Again, at every step of the process, your timer automatically starts and stops, recording the time spent in each area.  

Let’s click Move Parts again, but as you know, you can always swipe. The parts move along to Ready for Packaging, when I’m ready to package, swipe those parts. 

Finishing packaging, swipe again and the parts go to Shipping.

Though the work order is not yet marked as Completed, your parts have gone through the entire production process, giving you complete data to dive into the margins on this job.

Wow, our margins are low, 2%. 

Digging in, it’s easy to see exactly what happened throughout this job. You have the overview of costs at the top, and you’ll see any Outsourcing costs here when that part has outsourcing in its process. 

It’s also broken down by Margin Per Part Number, so all parts on the work order get listed here. 

Then there’s Cost Per Station, and if you click on the Part Number, it breaks down the station cost by that Part. 

Here we can pinpoint exactly which step is causing problems, and see exactly where money is going. 

All stations seem to be what we would expect for labor time spent, except… the Prep station. It took a lot longer than we planned for in Prep. Maybe this job is more intricate than we thought, or we have a lazy operator, or maybe they need a little more training.

Scrolling down, notice you have more details: which Operator was in the Prep Station working these parts, what time the parts were in the Prep Station. 

Maybe it’s a new job. Well, it’s good to know we estimated wrong and now we can adjust prices, for the next time we get this part number. 

I want to drill down further into the margin history of this specific part. Here you have an overview of averages over all recently completed work orders—looks like we had 35% margins on this part in the past. 

It’s easy to spot trends, see recurring issues, and find out what drives your bottom line…helping you make adjustments for future work.

Ken, a Sales Project Manager at D&K Powder, says

"Steelhead proved that for a certain part number, we lose money if we run 50. If we run 100, we hit our target margin.

Ready to find out where more of your profits are hiding? Book your Steelhead demo today and discover the freedom and control of a digital production floor—now that’s some reel talk.