Hi everyone. Ive recently taken a role of assisting a number of workshop (vehicle, general engineering etc) try to improve there work productivity. Its with one large organisation with a number of workshops. They all use Office products such as Powerpoint excell and Word.

They have a maintenance management system that allows them to track their resources and plan there work, with forecasting etc and all of these workshop entities use the same software for this function. This about where the similarities end. While most of the workshops will work on the same equipment. many of them have their own unique equipment as well depending on who they support.

The challenge that I face is to keep the IT side of the house to a minimum at the Tradesman on the floor, by that I mean he should spend no more than 5 minutes completing any job card or paperwork before he/she cleans their bay in preparation for the next job to come onto the floor.

There are PC terminals on the workshop floor but not at every bay. My initial though was to go old school and have a A5 job card clipped to the post at the post on the bay where the tradesman can pull the card, fill it out and then hand it in where the production clerks would transfer the data.

But then I figured, we live in a technological age, why cant we do something like this on a PC? bearing in mind that not every bay has a PC at it, there could be scope in the future for every tradey be issued with a tablet.

knowing that the organisation primarily uses MS Office as its documenattiopm tool, id be keen to hear ideas how:

1. Jobs can be allocated to the tradesmen Electronically so that they simply need to either open up an office product and acknowledge accept the job.

2. Be able to update the card each day with hours and any notes so that the production clerks at the other end can see it and update the job on the maintenance management system, and

3. Complete the task with some kind of electronic signature so that the file can be archived and the job can be completed

4. Nice to have Some means of document sharing incase two people edit at the same time.

Limitations?
all of this using Microsoft office.. Excell, word, powerpoint or outlook

If you like id be happy to put together a work flow so uyou can see what id like to achieve. Over to you