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Time Production Coordination

Where do I start trying to control actual time vs. estimated time. Who's responsibility would that fall under in a normal advertising agency.?

Thanks,

Denise

In our agency we have a traffic person. I am, more or less, the overseer of all the jobs, therefore every Thursday morning, I pull an job summaries on all jobs in production for that particular week. I review, meet w/traffic if necessary and then traffic meets w/AE's and/or producers to update. It's at this time we find out if we have under bid, if we need to do an amendment to original bid and/or stop the job.

Felica Sparks
Office Manager
Benton Newton & Partners Advertising
Visit our web site at www.cre8ive.com

Everyone is responsible for watching their estimated hours to actual hours. However, we have a budget control position who also does the billing. She pulls recaps and will alert the account manager. If you don't have that position, the account manager should watch it. They can then discuss the situation. If the hours are going over due to agency fault, it can be handled internally. If the hours are going over due to client changes, change orders need to be written and presented by account manager. Account managers should always be ultimately responsible for all financial matters on a clients business.

shelly

We would have Account Service keep tabs on costs. However, you really need to impress upon staff that they need to look at job tickets and estimates in C&P to see what kind of time they have allotted for a project.

Jerry Bray,
COO Harvey & Daughters

It depends on the competancy of the person estimating "other peoples time".

A safer way is for the traffic manager to ask people to estimate themselves beforehand. Then they have equity in the decisions and are more likely to be aware & conscious of keeping within the allowances

Peter Brown

I think it would be the responsibility of the production manager to make sure that the designers are not going over the estimated time. The way I track this is when you use the scheduling feature it has a column where it shows time left. Once that number becomes a negative number, you know that the the estimated time has been accounted for. First thing you have to do is to get your employees to enter their time on a daily basis or there will be no way of knowing how much time has been spent on a particular job. I hope this helps. Happy holidays!

Kristi Parker|White