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DATA COLLECTION
Data Collection Overview
The Data Collection module allows production employees to report their labor directly to work orders and eliminates the need for after-the-fact labor entry from time cards or labor tickets or labels.
Employees can enter their labor via keypad entry or bar code scanning.  Extra computers are located on the shop floor which the employees use as time clocks for clocking in and out of work order routing sequences.  
Labor transactions are stored in the data collection transactions file and are eventually batch posted to the work order files.  This batch posting can be performed once a day or several times a day, depending on how timely your work order status information needs to be.   
You can use one of three data collection modes: labor and production, in which both time and parts counts are recorded, production only, in which time is ignored and only parts counts are recorded, or labor only, in which only time is collected and parts counts are not entered.
Your labor shifts can be defined in SD-F  Data Collection Defaults.  Buffer periods can be defined so that employees can clock in before and after shifts begin, yet job costing only occurs when the shift starts and stops when the shift ends.  Lunches and breaks can be defined so that job costing stops without requiring employees to clock out.
NOTE: The employee does not designate a shift when using the data collection programs.  Instead, each employee is assigned to a shift in SM-G  Enter Employees.  
There are three other settings you can make in SD-F  Data Collection Defaults.  First, you can specify whether you want the data collection entry programs (DC-A, DC-B, DC-C) to operate in full screen mode or in a two-line format used by some data collection terminals.  If you using standard PC monitors, you should select full screen mode.  The second setting determines whether employees are allowed to enter multiple work orders at the same time or whether they are restricted to working on only one work order at a time.  
Finally, you can choose to enable Employee Shift Start/Stop.  If you do so, then before an employee can clock into a work order, he must first clock into his shift.  At the end of the day, when clocking out of the shift, all open work orders will also be clocked out.  This feature enables a single shift record of the overall start and stop time for the employee for the day for payroll purposes and eliminates the need for using Indirect work orders to collect non-productive time.  Shift start/stop data can be printed out in  DC-D  Print Labor Status or exported to a text file for transfer to Checkmark payroll or used as the input file of your payroll service.  
Hardware
If you wish to use bar coding, standard PC's can be equipped with a USB "wedge" bar code reader.
Whatever you use for bar code readers, make sure they can handle a 3-character bar code.  Some devices have a 4-character minimum and therefore cannot read the 3-character work order suffix.