Managing Your Labor in Aspire

Understanding the difference between Direct and Indirect labor allows you to identify where the frontline team is spending their time. This helps you to determine inefficiencies and make adjustments. Before we share a couple ways to review your Indirect and Direct labor in Aspire Software, lets define the differences.

Indirect labor includes vacation and sick time, load and unload labor, training, and equipment maintenance. When it comes to managing indirect labor, you might consider evaluating your load/unload and equipment maintenance processes. Training is very important, so creating an efficient training program will help you manage the time (and money) spent on training. The goal here is to have as little indirect labor as possible. By implementing a standard process, your frontline team will be much more efficient and waste less time on indirect labor.

Direct labor can be defined as estimated labor, which includes when the team is clocked into a work ticket and mobilization time. Mobilization is a direct cost of traveling from one job site to another. By setting it up as direct labor you can recover the cost, while having access to the data. Direct labor should be managed to the time estimated– assuming it was estimated correctly. Click here to read our blog on production rates.

Now that we are clear on the difference, let’s look at some ways to manage and review your labor:

Mobilization:

Aspire captures any time not assigned to a work ticket (both direct and indirect) and distributes it between the property work tickets as mobilization. This amount is included in your total hours/labor dollars when job costing. While you can find ways to pull out the Drive Time to review only direct hours, we encourage you to include mobilization in your estimates. This sets you up to recover the cost and makes job costing simpler. To do this, we suggest adding mobilization to every service in your estimates. 

Indirect Tickets:

Since time allocated to a specific work ticket and mobilization are both “billable” or direct hours, anything outside of that should go to an indirect ticket. These tickets can be very specific, allowing you to track non-billable time spent on certain activities. We believe there is a fine balance between getting the data you want and setting your frontline team up for success. For example, a great indirect set up might include: 

With these three tickets, you can pull information on where efficiency may need improvement, but the layout is simple enough for your frontline team to use accurately.

Scheduling:

It is important to account for indirect hours when scheduling. Our rule of thumb is to schedule 8% indirect hours for Maintenance, and 10% for Enhancement/Construction. For example, if you have 10 employees on your maintenance team, and each employee is working a 10-hour day with 8% indirect hours then you can account for approximately 9-9.2 hours per employee, or 90-92 hours scheduled for a given day.

Lists/Dials:

We suggest that a manager in a position such as Branch or General Manager, are reviewing the Billable versus Indirect hours weekly. To do so, you can set up lists and dials in Aspire which will pull the total Indirect and Direct hours worked for the previous week. You would then compare the two totals. If the indirect total is greater than 8-10% of the direct hours, you could then dive into the data and find out who, when, and where so you can re-direct your team through your operations or Account Manager.

This one topic of managing your labor can open several “to-do’s” in order to fully manage it. If you are looking for additional support in this area, whether it be estimation, scheduling, or list creation, please schedule a consultation!