Production Tracking

I need ideas. My team uses Infinity for mostly providing some organization to our production workflow. We create plane manuals.

Our process goes like this:

  1. Initial Capture
  2. Content Review
  3. QA
  4. Final QA
  5. Post Approval Check (This is a last look through before it’s sent to the customer)
  6. Loaded (This means that book has been loaded onto the customer’s shared drive)

What I’m having trouble with is getting a true count of how many days the Editor ACTUALLY spent on their book. Currently, we only have one Start Date (the day the Editor began the initial capture) and one Final Approval Date (the date it’s approved for customer) for each Book (Item) (which means we’re counting all the days a book sat in somebody’s queue to work, and that’s unfair to my folks). Then we just have one attribute per process (Writing/Editing, Content Review, QA, and Final QA) which is the current status at each process (For example, when an Editor starts working on the Book, they change their Status (Label) to In Work OR when QA finishes reviewing the Book and approves it, they change their status to Complete - Ready for Final QA).

Currently, this is how it looks:

However, we constantly will get pulled away, so we’re always having to put things on the back burner for higher priority Books. For example, QA will send back a book that fails their review, so the Editor will need to stop doing what they’re doing to do this rework.

Now, I know I can look at each book’s Activity Log and roughly get a better idea, but that’s so time consuming. Is there a better way of tracking this? Ideas?

My first thought was to create a Start Date and End Date for each process. However, a book can be reviewed by each process multiple times. For example, a completed reworked Book will need to be reviewed by QA again, sometimes QA can look at the same book 3x-4x (Yeah, we’re working on that lol). So, that means each process would need up to 4 Start Dates and End Dates and that would be like 16 attributes! That’s not including ALL the other attributes we need for each Book.

OH and to add to the difficulty of it all, if another component is needed (maybe another website to integrate the times in) it needs to be accessible from a government computer.

Thanks in advanced and taking the time to read ALLL OF THIIISSSS!