Manufacturing operations
Custom manufacturing time tracking software for Quebec shops
Track shop-floor labor by employee, project, and activity before it becomes a spreadsheet cleanup problem.
DEVTom builds custom internal applications for manufacturers that need practical time capture, production visibility, and project labor reporting without forcing the shop into a generic SaaS workflow.
- •NFC badge and barcode scanner workflows
- •Productive vs support time reporting
- •Project and activity-level labor visibility
If this sounds familiar, your time data is arriving too late
- •Time is entered after the work is already done
- •Excel is used to reconcile hours, projects, and activities
- •You cannot separate productive time from support work
- •Project labor overruns appear too late
- •Workers need a scanner-friendly flow, not office forms
- •Breaks, shifts, overtime, and exceptions require manual correction
What a custom shop-floor system can capture
Capture time at the source
Use a kiosk-style flow with NFC badges and barcode scanners so employees can record work without typing on the shop floor.
Track project and activity labor
Record who worked on what, when, and for how long. Time can be grouped by employee, project, activity, and period.
Measure productive vs support time
Classify activities so managers can compare direct production time against support work such as handling, maintenance, meetings, or cleanup.
From time tracking to production visibility
A Quebec manufacturing workshop needed more than a digital timesheet. The real need was visibility into where shop labor was going across employees, projects, and activities.
That kind of system has to fit the physical workflow: tablets, scanners, badges, gloves, scheduled breaks, shift-end rules, and occasional exceptions.
Once the data is captured reliably, the business can report on useful KPIs such as total hours, hours by project, productive time, support time, and rework or exception patterns.
A practical phased approach
- 1.Map employees, projects, activities, and shop-floor rules
- 2.Launch a first kiosk workflow for reliable time capture
- 3.Add reports by employee, project, activity, and period
- 4.Expand into budget burn, dashboards, and alerts once the data is trustworthy
Built around real shop-floor rules
The hard part is rarely the screen. It is encoding the real rules: one active activity per employee, automatic closure of previous work, scheduled break deductions, overtime exceptions, support activities, and reports that managers can trust.
Frequently asked questions
Why not use standard time tracking software?
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Standard tools may track hours, but they often do not match the shift rules, break rules, activity categories, project structure, and physical scanning process of a real manufacturing shop.
Can barcode scanners and NFC badges work with a web app?
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Yes. Many scanners and NFC readers can behave like keyboard input devices, which allows a kiosk-style web app to receive scans directly.
Can the system handle breaks automatically?
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Yes, if the business rules are known. Scheduled breaks can be deducted automatically instead of asking workers to scan in and out for every break.
What is the difference between time tracking and production visibility?
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Time tracking records hours. Production visibility shows where those hours went, whether they were productive, which projects consumed them, and whether work is drifting from plan.
Does this need to be built all at once?
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No. A practical first version can focus on reliable capture and basic reports, then grow into dashboards, budget tracking, and integrations.
Related Operational Insights
Practical lessons from real operational systems
The Software Was the Easy Part
Lessons from digitizing a small manufacturing operation: paper habits, visibility, business rules, and trusted operational data.
When a new time system exposes old habits
A field note on what parallel paper and NFC time capture revealed during validation.
The factory does not disappear when the owner leaves
How captured time events became a practical real-time window into production activity.
Want to know where your shop-floor labor really goes?
DEVTom can help you design the capture, reporting, and KPI layer your operation needs, starting with a scoped first version.