Tracking a Person's Work?

[sara82]

I'm undecided in what I should to to track what an employee does for the day. Currently employees have a 5X7 index card which printed out fields and they fill it it by hand and turn it in.

Instead of the employees doing this I want to record all of this information in the database.

These are the fields that I will include:
EmployeeName, Book, WorkType, WorkEffort, StartPage, EndPage, StartTime, EndTime, TotalPgsWorked, Comments.

Should I bound all of these fields to the tblWorkLog or should a create unbound fields and create an append query which will add these fields to the table.

I don't want the users to enter their own start time and end time as they might not record it accurately.

Should the time be recorded this way: Have the user open the form, when the form opens that will record the start time. Have the user have the form remained open until the end of the day or when he or she finishes through out the day. When the form is closed that will record the end time.

What is an alternative of doing that though? Have the user open the form record all the info have the startime recorded. Exit out of the database, when they finish their work, open the database go back to that record and record the end time?

My problem here would be there is no uniqe ID. The user can work on a Book for a week, and can also work on multiple books on the same day. How would they know which record to open.

I'm uncertain how to lay this out and begin it any insight will be greatly appreciated.

 

[kyjoey]

You might want to try a web application. This would be a bit more indepth than you want to do though. Are you limited to Access?

-Joey

 

[sara82]

Yes, I am limited to Access, they don't want the users here to have access to the internet

 

[mhcruella]

What is a book and a workeffort?

 

[coachdan]

Do you have a company intranet? If so, you could publish the app on it.

coachdan32

http://www.malehsbaseball.com

 

[BoxHead]

sara82,

My experience has been that it is useful to have employees enter their time AND capture start and end times behind the scenes. This gives you a good picture of productive time compared to work time. That's not a bad conversation for a manager to have periodically with employees.

I think you have a few issues and opportunities that can be optimized in your database design. I would recommend several tables: tblEmployee, tblProject and tblActivity at minimum.

tblEmployee has an ID field, Name field and perhaps a field that designates type of work performed. You may want to consider a start date field and end date field for each employee.

tblProject has an ID field, a Book name field, a number of pages in book, project start date and end date.

tblActivity contains all of the fields that you referred to in your original post plus an Autonumber ID field, and an OpenTime and CloseTime that are system-captured start and end times.

The form would have a dropdown based on tblEmployee for the user to log in, a dropdown based on tblProject to select the book being worked on.

This structure would allow you to track and report on Projects/Books started and finished and/or percent complete; Employees who have worked on each project; how many pages per project or total pages completed by each user for any date range.

This would also allow you to create a measure for something like 'Project Complexity' to recognize that some books are worked more quickly or more slowly than others. I think this could be important because when you start tracking employess activities at this level, there is a definite "Big Brother" dynamic that you cannot avoid. You have to be very careful that the data you report is meaningful in your company's culture. While I am assuming that the Work type is some sort of proofing or editing that requires a degree of skill, I could see a situation where employees who are very good at their job end up with more complex books to work thatn less-skilled employees. It's very easy to focus on a measure like "pages per hour" but you could end up with reports that reflect poorly on the more skilled employees. This would either be unfair to the skilled employees or else everyone would just assume that your data doesn't really mean much. Neither option is very good.

HTH







John

 

[needmoremoney]

Just design a table with the fields that you want. Once that is done, make sure you have a date field. Set it to equal =Date(). this will generate the date and time if you like, into the field when the use opens the form. Once the user had completed the form they can close it out. The user will continue to open and reuse the form. Each time the user uses the form it will be a brand new form. All the inputs will be saved.

Create a query with a filter to filter for the dates that you would like and for which user. That can be outputted into a report for you to print.

Need an example let me know.
Hope that helps..