How an engineering team uses Timeular to stay within budget

Mieke Motmans is Ortho Clinical Engineering Team Leader at Materialise in Belgium, a company which empowers sustainable 3D printing applications. Mieke leads a team of five, which is one of two teams using Timeular within Materialise. In total, there are 20 Timeular users at Materialise.

The challenge: finding a way to identify how much time is spent on each project

Mieke’s team focuses on processing cases for their customers. The team works on different projects and so it’s important for them to be able to identify how much time they spend on each case and on which project.

Before they started using Timeular, the Materialise Team worked with a system that they checked on a monthly basis. They were required to log how much time they had spent on each task in hour long blocks. During busy periods, the team often forgot to log their hours and so they would fill out their hours at the end of the month using guess work, which led to a lot of inaccuracy and took up time.

The solution: using the insights to remain profitable

Mieke and the team use Timeular to log how much time they are spending on each case and project. Materialise makes cost calculations based on each product separately and so it’s important for them to have an accurate record of how the time is spent. Often they are involved in bigger projects from other teams and so it’s helpful for them to keep track of how much effort is being put into a project.

Using the data, Mieke can see how busy each team member has been and if there is time spare to work on projects. This is helpful as they try to keep the time spent on cases equal across the team so that they can all work on projects too. The process engineers also use the data to identify where they can increase efficiency.

The team tracks the issues they are working on by assigning them to a category. The data is exported to Excel and then the team adds their case information to make final reports. The team uses hashtags to differentiate between projects. This helps them understand how much time they’re spending on issues in total and provides the information they need when they make the case to management to ask for additional help.

It’s helpful for project managers to know who worked on each project and how much time was spent in total. Every month they look at the total amount of time spent on a specific product and check whether it was realistic and within budget. Timeular helps the team stay profitable.

The outcome: accurate data that ensures projects stay within budget

Thanks to Timeular, the data that the team generates is now entirely accurate, much broader and provides a much more specific breakdown which helps the team learn from how they’ve spent their time. Projects now stay within budget and the team ensures that work is evenly distributed and that any spare time is enjoyed fairly across the team on projects outside of the usual cases.