A punch-in punch-out system is commonly used to track the times that an employee arrives at and departs from the workplace. But it doesn’t measure how well the employee spent the time against the original plan from a progress standpoint and doesn’t determine if the employee has been under or over performed. For the time-based service businesses such as private nurses and private trainers and assembly-line based operations such as consumer banking service, hospital emergency room and consumer product manufacturing, using a punch-in punch-out system might be good enough. But for project-based work such as Basic Research, Construction, Energy, Engineering, Software Development, Information Technology (IT), Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Marketing and Consulting work in progress (WIP) time tracking is needed.

For people involved in knowledge work, they must understand that no two members of technical staff were created equally. A good example would be system debugging. It is common that two software engineers have similar education and experience but one can pin down the problem rather quickly while the other one still doesn’t have any clue. WIP Time Tracking provides useful information such as what types of jobs can be effectively done by whom within the team. This helps the team to better organize to achieve higher efficiency via Right People Right Job.