Contract Administration Module

[TimGreenhalgh]

I work for a utility that currently uses Ellipse 5.2.3.7. We are trying to see if the Contract Administration Module would help us in tracking our contractor hours and costs by work order. Anybody have any thoughts on this or know of any good links to be able to better understand the Contract Administration Module and what it offers?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Archimedez]

The Ellipse Contract Administration module, and its "Advanced" module, do not have the capacity to track Contractor hours. Rather, they focus on awarding the contrzact, managing its various clauses, and a whole spectrum of payment options.
With 14 years in the MIMS/Ellipse community, I have yet to see a Contract Work Management model that accurately links the Tasks performed to the hours billed. The core issue is that Ellipse allows work to be assigned at 3 different levels: Work Group, Crew, and Individual. But, Time/Labor can ONLY be entered at the individual level. So, unless you want to create "Employee" records for your Contractors, use MS Project, PrimaVera, or similar and interface the consolidated information to Ellipse.

 

[TimGreenhalgh]

Thanks Greg. I appreciate the answer. We are currently using an access database to track these but were hoping that we could use Ellipse.

We will keep looking at an external solution.

Thanks again.

Tim

 

[dianne001]

Hello Tim,
We currently put contractor costs/hours on an ellipse work order for tracking. We have ellipse 5.2.3.6.
Hope this helps.
Dianne

 

[TimGreenhalgh]

Our mangagement team made the decision when we went live (2004) that we would not put any contractor employees in our payroll system. This means we can not charge their time directly to a work order as labor time. We track it out side of Ellipse and then we pay the invoice so the costs hit the work order as other costs. We have no manhour information other than what is in the Access Database. There lies the problem.

Thanks for the response Dianne.

Tim

 

[dpes1]

Hi!
We do track our Vendor support hours through the Ellipse WO system. We've created generic ID's, say for our Caterpillar dealer, and set labor class / earning codes to $0.00 so that we track the hours but the costs are always zero.

Rgds
Donna

 

[Calator]

HI,
1. Where contractors are closely intergrated in our labour force (such as labour Hire contractors), the individuals have been entered in Payroll in a special pay group for the purpose of recording the hours worked. All transactions for these persons only record hours worked and the amounts are zero so that there is no financial impact. A report of the hours worked is produced from Payroll transactions and sent to the Contractor's company. the company invoices us and the invoice is loaded and paid via Accounts Payable.
2. Where the contractors are external consultants, who work on a more ad-hoc basis, they are not entered in Payroll. They submit a timesheet and invoice us for the hours. The information from the timesheets is kept outside Ellipse. Ellipse only records the invoice details.
3. We use Contracts Admininstration module for tracking high value/long terms contracts for services, with various "panels" of suppliers/contractors, such as IT Services, Legal Services, Accounting Firms, etc. It is appropriate tracking expenses against contracts that happen over long periods of time (eg 1-5 years) with the ability to raise new "portions" of contracts and breaking down the total spend by contract "elements", which could be the various type of components that make the entire contract.