In July’s In-Plant Insights, I went over the difference between a fully implemented and a semi-implemented PSP inplant. Fully implemented means that ALL work is submitted online via PSP; there are no work orders other than a PSP work order of some type. Semi-implemented are those inplants that still take in orders that circumvent PSP. The benefit of being fully implemented is that all orders to the inplant can be tracked and useful data can be mined for a plethora of applications.
At my college, 90% of the work that comes into Campus Graphics (CG) is institutional work that we cannot bill graphic design charges to, which is problematic in many ways. While chargeable design work is readily apparent via an invoice, non-chargeable labor costs can be easily overlooked if not intentionally tracked.
Case-in-point: We have two graphic designers at CG and both of them are working at full capacity in terms of work load. If I only tracked chargeable design charges, and did not track design hours for all the jobs that come into CG, then I would only be capturing a fraction (10%) of the time the design center is actually providing to my parent organization.
Being fully implemented affords the inplant manager the benefit of mining data that has been programmed into PSP by edu staff; however, PSP has many ways the manager can custom program the software to mine data that is native to their operation.
A good way to track native data is through the Add-on Items in PSP. In addition to charging graphic design charges to our chargeable customers, CG uses an Add-on item to track non-chargeable design hours to our non-chargeable institutional customers. The benefit of tracking non-chargeable labor costs is that you can run an Add-on report filtering by date range or by Add-on type, which provides valuable data if you want ever want to gauge productivity or capacity in a specific production operation.
By tracking all non-chargeable design time via the Add-on items, CG can report to our parent organization that 44% of our graphic design capacity is spent on institutional jobs that are not charged and graphic design demand for non-chargeable accounts has increased by 19% from last year. In terms of dollar amounts, CG provided $65,940 in graphic design services (which equals one full-time graphic design position with salary and benefits) to the college that was not charged to institutional programs. All this data is invaluable when I submit reports to my superiors on the value CG is providing to the college.
W. Edwards Deming said “in God we trust, all others must bring data,” so I would encourage all inplants that use PSP to become fully implemented and use the robust features of PSP to mine native data to better position your inplant in your parent organization.
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