How to Allocate Engineering Hours Correctly
3 mins read
Published Dec 10, 2025
In the world of industrial automation, the line between "office work" and "field work" is rarely a clean break. One moment you are in the office revising a CAD drawing for a control panel, and three hours later you are on the shop floor troubleshooting a VFD that refuses to communicate.
For control system integrators, this fluidity is part of the job description. However, it creates a massive blind spot for project management. When an engineer's day is a blur of three different project phases, how do you ensure those hours are billed to the right bucket? Accurately tracking this time is critical not just for billing, but for understanding the true profitability of your projects.
The "Blended Day" Problem
Most project management software assumes a user sits at a desk working on one task for eight hours. Automation engineers rarely have that luxury.
The Scenario: An engineer is designing a safety circuit (Phase: Design). They get a call from a site technician needing help with an I/O check (Phase: Commissioning).
The Risk: Without easy switching, the engineer likely books the whole day to "Design" to save time.
The Result: Your design budget looks inflated, and your commissioning budget looks artificially efficient. When you bid the next job, you will underquote the commissioning time, eating into your margins.
The core issue lies in the transition friction. Traditional time tracking methods often rely on end-of-week estimates, where an engineer looks back at a chaotic Tuesday and guesses, "I think I spent 4 hours on design and 4 on commissioning."
In reality, that Tuesday might have looked like: 2 hours of design, an emergency 3-hour site visit for commissioning, 1 hour of travel (often billable differently), and 2 hours of remote PLC programming. If these are all lumped under a generic "Engineering" code, you lose the data needed to bid future jobs accurately. You might underestimate how much field support your design choices actually require.
Defining Clear WBS Codes for Integrators
Effective tracking starts with a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that mirrors the life of a controls project. Avoid generic buckets like "Engineering." Instead, break it down:
Hardware Design: Panel layout, schematics, BOM creation.
Software Development: PLC/HMI programming, simulation, off-line testing.
Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT): Staging and testing before shipment.
Commissioning/Startup: On-site I/O checkout, loop tuning, SAT.
Project Management: Meetings, procurement, client communication.
By standardizing these codes, you ensure that every engineer—regardless of seniority—categorizes their "blended days" consistently.
To solve this, project management for control system integrators must move away from retrospective guessing and toward real-time phase switching. The goal is to capture the "context switch" the moment it happens, without burdening the engineer with administrative overhead. By granularly tracking phases—Design, Programming, Travel, Commissioning—you reveal the hidden costs in your integration projects.
Reducing the Friction of Time Entry
The best process in the world fails if it is too hard to use. If an engineer has to log into a VPN, open a slow ERP system, and click through five menus just to switch from "Design" to "Commissioning," they won't do it.
Tools for integrators need to be mobile-first and instant. The switch should take seconds, not minutes.
Time Assign lets you switch project phases in seconds. Stop guessing where your budget went and start tracking reality.
