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Non-Productive Time Accounting System
1986-87 Whilst CO of 1 Base Workshop Bn, the CEO developed a means by which an IBM PC could interface via RS232 with the Machine Assisted Workshop Documentation (MAWD) system, used for workshop production control. MAWD ran on a Perkin Elmer 32/20 Defence Standard Minicomputer. The Defence Computing Services Division had long claimed it was not possible to interface PCs with this mini-computer. The CEO wrote the programs for the PC in Turbo Pascal. The PC pretended to be a terminal and was capable of taking data held in text files, generated by other means, and performing standard transactions in an automated fashion on MAWD. This system was used to raise dummy jobs for each non-productive time activity on all cost centres to monitor/compute non-productive as well as productive time. At the end of each month the system closed off the jobs and collated the results of time booked to them for each of the nonproductive activities. It was then possible to display trends using graphs produced by a spreadsheet program called SuperCalc. The arrangement performed transactions in 20 minutes that would normally have taken a clerk 10 working days to complete. This was and, at the time of writing, still is the first and only time the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Public Service actually quantified to some exactitude the ratio of non-productive to productive time. The results painted a very positive picture of the productivity of workshop staff at a time when it was conventional wisdom to contract out Defence Force logistic support in the interests of lowering costs.