Labor costing

Stop pricing by guesswork. Start pricing by data.

Most SMB manufacturers price jobs the same way: estimate. The owner walks the floor, looks at the part, says "five hours of labor." Six months in, the customer asks for a price reduction, and there's no data to push back with. Labor costing means every build has actual measured labor minutes — by operator, by station, by step. The next quote starts from data, not gut.

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How the data gets captured

Every kiosk event is a labor event.

Operator badges in at the workstation: that's a start timestamp. They walk through the BOM section by section: each section has its own start + end. They hit Done: end timestamp. The system has measured labor minutes per build, per step, per operator — no time card to fill out, no spreadsheet to reconcile. The data exists because the work happened.

  • Badge-in start + Done end timestamps per build
  • Per-section breakdown (which step took the longest?)
  • Per-operator attribution — see learning curves
  • Multi-station workflows handle handoffs (start on station A, finish on station B)
  • Idle time excluded automatically (operator stepped away → paused)
Roll up at the level you actually decide at

Per build, per job, per product, per customer, per quarter.

The right level depends on the question. Per build: is this individual job profitable? Per product: what does this assembly actually cost? Per customer: which customer is consuming the most labor relative to their margin? Per quarter: is total labor cost trending up or down? All rolled up from the same kiosk events. No second data entry, no reconciliation.

  • Per build — single job profitability check
  • Per product / assembly — true unit cost for quoting
  • Per customer — which accounts cost the most labor
  • Per shift — first-shift vs second-shift labor efficiency
  • Per quarter — trends in total labor cost vs revenue
What you can finally do with this

Quote like a CFO. Push back like a sales engineer.

The first time you can show a customer the actual labor data behind a quote, the conversation changes. "Your part takes 47 minutes of measured labor on average. Here's the distribution. The 90th percentile is 58 minutes. If you want a price reduction, here are the three steps that cost the most — let's talk about which ones you can simplify." That conversation requires data. Tribal knowledge doesn't hold up.

  • Quote new jobs from measured comparable-build data
  • Defend pricing with distribution data, not averages
  • Identify which steps cost the most labor — target for improvement
  • Compare per-operator efficiency for coaching opportunities
  • Track the impact of a process change on labor cost over weeks
No more separate time studies

Your time study runs continuously and updates itself.

Traditional time studies are a separate exercise: an industrial engineer with a stopwatch standing behind an operator, capturing 30 samples, computing an average, posting it on the wall. The data is stale the day you finish. Ignite Lean's time study runs every shift, every day, on every build. The average updates automatically. The spread is visible. The trend is visible.

  • Continuous time study — every build is a data point
  • Average, median, P90, P10 visible per BOM step
  • Trend lines per WI version — see whether the v5 change actually helped
  • Compare new operators to seasoned ones for training-curve insight
  • Anchor new-product quotes against similar shipped products
When the value lands

Month 2, when you re-quote a recurring job.

Month 1, labor costing is interesting. Month 2, when a customer comes back for a re-quote on a part you've been shipping all year, you open the labor-costing report, see the actual cost, find out you've been losing margin on every unit, and re-price with confidence. That's the real win. The data was always there — you just couldn't see it.

  • Month 1: data accumulates, baseline established
  • Month 2: first re-quote with real numbers
  • Month 3: process-improvement targets become obvious
  • Month 6: pricing meetings move from gut to data
  • Always: zero extra entry burden on the operator
Explore the platform

The rest of Ignite Lean

Design

Lay out the plant and sequence every station before a unit moves.

Execute

Run every build from any tablet, with the operator at the center.

Supervise

See the whole floor live and act on it from one screen.

Insights

Know where the line is slow and trace every unit you build.

Compliance

A full ISO 9001:2015 QMS on the same tablet — CAPA, audits, complaints, calibration, training.

Maintenance

A full CMMS on the same tablet — assets, work orders, PMs, parts, vendors, MTBF / MTTR.

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