🎉 New Year, New Savings! ✨ Get smarter time tracking with Up to 15% OFF your first year of TimeLive!
Offer Terms
Sign Up Now!
Days
Hours
Minutes
Seconds
Livetecs logo
Access Free Plan
Sign in
Access Free Plan
Sign in
Livetecs logo
Sign in
Livetecs logo
Access Free Plan
Sign in
Customer Story
Customer Story

Siemens

The hours nobody could see

How Siemens cut field time reporting from three days to same-day with TimeLive, and gave its field engineering teams a live picture of their own work without moving a single byte off its own network.

3 days → Same-day

From a technician logging hours to finance seeing them

37% less

Time spent on payroll reconciliation

65% replaced

Spreadsheets and standalone tools retired

3 days → Same-day

From a technician logging hours to finance seeing them

37% less

Time spent on payroll reconciliation

65% replaced

Spreadsheets and standalone tools retired

Siemens
Siemens field engineering and service teams move between client sites, installations, and service calls throughout the week.

Industry

Industrial engineering
and manufacturing

Teams

Field engineering and service

Deployment

On-premises, Siemens-managed infrastructure

Platform

TimeLive by Livetecs

Industry

Industrial engineering
and manufacturing

Teams

Field engineering
and service

Deployment

On-premises, Siemens-managed infrastructure

Platform

TimeLive by Livetecs

Key outcomes

Same-day

Field time reporting

Down from 3 days between a technician logging hours and that data reaching finance.

37% less

Reconciliation time

Estimated reduction once time, approvals, and cost data lived in one system.

65%

Tools replaced

Separate spreadsheets and standalone tools retired for one system of record.

Siemens

The full platform runs inside Siemens' own network: time tracking, project costing, payroll, scheduling, and reporting.

Background: The hours nobody could see

Ask a project manager in industrial engineering when they last fully trusted their own labor cost numbers, and you’ll usually get a pause before the answer. It’s not that the numbers were wrong. It’s that they showed up late. A technician logs hours from memory at the end of the week. A spreadsheet gets emailed to another spreadsheet. By the time finance closes a pay cycle, the picture they’re looking at is already a week or two old.

That’s the quiet cost that field-based industries carry every day: manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, mobility, all the sectors Siemens works across. Technicians move between client sites, installations, and service calls constantly, and every move generates data that has to be chased down instead of simply captured. It rarely looks like a crisis from the outside. It just slowly costs an organization time, clarity, and a bit of trust in its own numbers.

Field service organizations across manufacturing and industrial engineering lose an estimated 25% of billable technician hours each week to manual, after-the-fact time entry.

Industry estimate across field service organizations, not Siemens-specific.

The decision: Closing the gap before it became a problem

Siemens wasn’t in trouble. It was scaling, and scaling well, which is exactly when this kind of gap tends to open up. Project managers were waiting longer than they’d like for a clear read on labor cost. Finance was rebuilding numbers by hand every pay cycle before payroll could even start. Site leads wanted a simple answer to a simple question, who’s deployed where right now, and didn’t always have one.
Instead of waiting for that gap to turn into a real problem, leadership decided to close it early. That meant a live view of labor cost for project managers, one source of truth for finance instead of several partial ones, and a dashboard for leadership instead of a quarterly compilation. All without adding administrative weight to field engineers who were already doing demanding technical work.

"The timing mattered because we were growing fast. We needed visibility into our workforce data before the gaps became bigger problems."

Siemens

"Before this, every site ran its own version of the same process. Now everyone's working off the same page, literally."

Siemens

Since deployment, Siemens has cut the time between a technician logging hours and that data reaching finance from 3 days to same-day.

The one requirement: Everything stayed inside Siemens' network

Everything else about the search bent around a single condition: the system had to live inside Siemens’ own infrastructure. Payroll data, project cost data, and employee information carry real weight in a security-conscious, regulated enterprise environment. A third-party, multi-tenant cloud platform simply wasn’t going to satisfy that bar, no matter how good the interface looked in a demo.
That requirement did most of the filtering on its own. Most workforce management platforms are built cloud-first, treating on-premises support as an afterthought, a lighter version of the product missing the features that actually matter. TimeLive by Livetecs was the exception. The full platform, time tracking, project costing, payroll, scheduling, reporting, ran entirely inside infrastructure Siemens already controlled, governed by policies the organization already trusted.

"Nothing left our network. That was the one requirement we couldn't compromise on, and it held."

Siemens

Why TimeLive: One platform instead of another tool on the pile

The rest of the evaluation came down to a short list of practical tests. Would one platform genuinely replace a patchwork of tools instead of adding another one to the pile? Could approval chains mirror how Siemens already made decisions, instead of forcing a new one on top? Would field engineers, mostly away from a desk, actually use it? And could it plug into existing payroll and financial systems without ripping them out first?
TimeLive answered yes to each of these. Time tracking, timesheets, project costing, payroll, expenses, scheduling, and reporting all sat under one roof. Approval workflows were configurable enough to match the existing chain of command, from a site lead’s first sign-off to a program director’s last. Mobile access meant technicians could log time and submit approvals from wherever they were working. It felt less like a sales pitch and more like a system built with the same rigor Siemens brings to its own engineering work.

TimeLive replaced 65% of separate spreadsheets and standalone tools with a single system of record.

Rollout: Listening before configuring

The first move wasn’t setup. It was discovery. Sessions with operations, finance, and IT stakeholders traced how time, approvals, and reporting actually worked day to day, not how a manual described them. Those conversations drew a clear line between what was worth standardizing across the whole organization and what reflected a site’s own way of working, worth leaving alone.
That distinction shaped everything that came after. TimeLive was deployed onto Siemens-managed infrastructure and configured around the organization’s real shape, its business units, regions, and individual field teams, with role-based access so a field engineer, a project manager, and a finance lead each saw exactly what mattered to them. Timesheet templates fit project-based field work, with mobile and kiosk entry so hours were captured at the point of work instead of reconstructed later.

"I enter my hours where I'm standing now. I'm not trying to remember Tuesday on a Friday night."

Siemens

Results: Same-day data and 37% less payroll reconciliation

Approval workflows mirrored the structure already in place. Reporting aggregated labor cost and utilization across the organization, giving resourcing teams a live answer to a question they used to have to piece together.

"I used to build a staffing plan on a week-old snapshot and hope it still held up. Now I can see utilization as it stands right now."

Siemens

Integrations connected TimeLive to Siemens’ existing payroll and financial systems, all without a single byte leaving the network.
Siemens

Steven Grant

Head of Grant Financing

"We went from spending 80 hours every quarter correcting timesheets to just an hour with TimeLive."

Siemens

"The real change wasn't accuracy, it was timing. We can see a budget drifting off course while there's still something we can do about it."

Siemens

Payroll reconciliation time dropped by an estimated 37% once time, approvals, and cost data lived in one system instead of several.

Geofencing: Verified time entries, one less thing to double-check

One detail earned more trust than the feature list suggested it would: geofencing. For an organization managing technicians across many job sites, being able to verify that a time entry was actually logged from the right location gave project managers one less thing to double-check. It also echoed the same standard of accuracy the organization already holds itself to on the engineering side.

Lessons learned: What we'd do the same way again

Moving site by site, instead of switching the whole organization on at once, made the transition easier to trust. Leaving alone the parts of a site’s process that already worked, rather than standardizing purely for uniformity’s sake, made adoption smoother everywhere it went. Listening to field teams before configuration was locked in made a real difference no manual could have. And getting clear early on what leadership actually needed to see in a dashboard saved a rebuild later on.

"Deployments like this only work when both sides bring the same discipline. Siemens' team treated it as a genuine partnership from the first discovery call. Patient, precise about what they needed, generous with their time. That's what made it possible to build something that actually fit, instead of something that just installed."

Livetecs

Final takeaway: Where it stands now

Siemens set out to bring the same clarity to its workforce data that it already brings to its engineering work. What began as a decision to standardize before growth made it harder has become something more lasting: a foundation that gives project managers, finance, and leadership a clear, current view of the work as it happens, running entirely inside infrastructure the organization already trusts.

In this case study

Try TimeLive free for 30 days

No credit card required.

Start Free

Key outcomes

Same-day

Field time reporting

Down from 3 days between a technician logging hours and that data reaching finance.

37% less

Reconciliation time

Estimated reduction once time, approvals, and cost data lived in one system.

65%

Tools replaced

Separate spreadsheets and standalone tools retired for one system of record.

Siemens

The full platform runs inside Siemens' own network: time tracking, project costing, payroll, scheduling, and reporting.

Background: The hours nobody could see

Ask a project manager in industrial engineering when they last fully trusted their own labor cost numbers, and you’ll usually get a pause before the answer. It’s not that the numbers were wrong. It’s that they showed up late. A technician logs hours from memory at the end of the week. A spreadsheet gets emailed to another spreadsheet. By the time finance closes a pay cycle, the picture they’re looking at is already a week or two old.
That’s the quiet cost that field-based industries carry every day: manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, mobility, all the sectors Siemens works across. Technicians move between client sites, installations, and service calls constantly, and every move generates data that has to be chased down instead of simply captured. It rarely looks like a crisis from the outside. It just slowly costs an organization time, clarity, and a bit of trust in its own numbers.

Field service organizations across manufacturing and industrial engineering lose an estimated 25% of billable technician hours each week to manual, after-the-fact time entry.

Industry estimate across field service organizations, not Siemens-specific.

The decision: Closing the gap before it became a problem

Siemens wasn’t in trouble. It was scaling, and scaling well, which is exactly when this kind of gap tends to open up. Project managers were waiting longer than they’d like for a clear read on labor cost. Finance was rebuilding numbers by hand every pay cycle before payroll could even start. Site leads wanted a simple answer to a simple question, who’s deployed where right now, and didn’t always have one.
Instead of waiting for that gap to turn into a real problem, leadership decided to close it early. That meant a live view of labor cost for project managers, one source of truth for finance instead of several partial ones, and a dashboard for leadership instead of a quarterly compilation. All without adding administrative weight to field engineers who were already doing demanding technical work.

"The timing mattered because we were growing fast. We needed visibility into our workforce data before the gaps became bigger problems."

Siemens

"Before this, every site ran its own version of the same process. Now everyone's working off the same page, literally."

Siemens

Since deployment, Siemens has cut the time between a technician logging hours and that data reaching finance from 3 days to same-day.

The one requirement: Everything stayed inside Siemens' network

Everything else about the search bent around a single condition: the system had to live inside Siemens’ own infrastructure. Payroll data, project cost data, and employee information carry real weight in a security-conscious, regulated enterprise environment. A third-party, multi-tenant cloud platform simply wasn’t going to satisfy that bar, no matter how good the interface looked in a demo.
That requirement did most of the filtering on its own. Most workforce management platforms are built cloud-first, treating on-premises support as an afterthought, a lighter version of the product missing the features that actually matter. TimeLive by Livetecs was the exception. The full platform, time tracking, project costing, payroll, scheduling, reporting, ran entirely inside infrastructure Siemens already controlled, governed by policies the organization already trusted.

"Nothing left our network. That was the one requirement we couldn't compromise on, and it held."

Siemens

Why TimeLive: One platform instead of another tool on the pile

The rest of the evaluation came down to a short list of practical tests. Would one platform genuinely replace a patchwork of tools instead of adding another one to the pile? Could approval chains mirror how Siemens already made decisions, instead of forcing a new one on top? Would field engineers, mostly away from a desk, actually use it? And could it plug into existing payroll and financial systems without ripping them out first?
TimeLive answered yes to each of these. Time tracking, timesheets, project costing, payroll, expenses, scheduling, and reporting all sat under one roof. Approval workflows were configurable enough to match the existing chain of command, from a site lead’s first sign-off to a program director’s last. Mobile access meant technicians could log time and submit approvals from wherever they were working. It felt less like a sales pitch and more like a system built with the same rigor Siemens brings to its own engineering work.

TimeLive replaced 65% of separate spreadsheets and standalone tools with a single system of record.

Rollout: Listening before configuring

The first move wasn’t setup. It was discovery. Sessions with operations, finance, and IT stakeholders traced how time, approvals, and reporting actually worked day to day, not how a manual described them. Those conversations drew a clear line between what was worth standardizing across the whole organization and what reflected a site’s own way of working, worth leaving alone.

That distinction shaped everything that came after. TimeLive was deployed onto Siemens-managed infrastructure and configured around the organization’s real shape, its business units, regions, and individual field teams, with role-based access so a field engineer, a project manager, and a finance lead each saw exactly what mattered to them. Timesheet templates fit project-based field work, with mobile and kiosk entry so hours were captured at the point of work instead of reconstructed later.

"I enter my hours where I'm standing now. I'm not trying to remember Tuesday on a Friday night."

Siemens

Results: Same-day data and 37% less payroll reconciliation

Approval workflows mirrored the structure already in place. Reporting aggregated labor cost and utilization across the organization, giving resourcing teams a live answer to a question they used to have to piece together.

"I used to build a staffing plan on a week-old snapshot and hope it still held up. Now I can see utilization as it stands right now."

Siemens

Integrations connected TimeLive to Siemens’ existing payroll and financial systems, all without a single byte leaving the network.
Siemens

Steven Grant

Head of Grant Financing

"We went from spending 80 hours every quarter correcting timesheets to just an hour with TimeLive."

Siemens

Siemens

Steven Grant

Head of Grant Financing

"We went from spending 80 hours every quarter correcting timesheets to just an hour with TimeLive."

Siemens

"The real change wasn't accuracy, it was timing. We can see a budget drifting off course while there's still something we can do about it."

Siemens

Payroll reconciliation time dropped by an estimated 37% once time, approvals, and cost data lived in one system instead of several.

Geofencing: Verified time entries, one less thing to double-check

One detail earned more trust than the feature list suggested it would: geofencing. For an organization managing technicians across many job sites, being able to verify that a time entry was actually logged from the right location gave project managers one less thing to double-check. It also echoed the same standard of accuracy the organization already holds itself to on the engineering side.

Lessons learned: What we'd do the same way again

Moving site by site, instead of switching the whole organization on at once, made the transition easier to trust. Leaving alone the parts of a site’s process that already worked, rather than standardizing purely for uniformity’s sake, made adoption smoother everywhere it went. Listening to field teams before configuration was locked in made a real difference no manual could have. And getting clear early on what leadership actually needed to see in a dashboard saved a rebuild later on.

"Deployments like this only work when both sides bring the same discipline. Siemens' team treated it as a genuine partnership from the first discovery call. Patient, precise about what they needed, generous with their time. That's what made it possible to build something that actually fit, instead of something that just installed."

Livetecs

Final takeaway: Where it stands now

Siemens set out to bring the same clarity to its workforce data that it already brings to its engineering work. What began as a decision to standardize before growth made it harder has become something more lasting: a foundation that gives project managers, finance, and leadership a clear, current view of the work as it happens, running entirely inside infrastructure the organization already trusts.

In this case study

Try TimeLive free for 30 days

No credit card required.

Start Free
Trusted by the World’s Top Enterprises
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
Enterprise teams across engineering, manufacturing, healthcare, and research run their time, projects, and approvals on TimeLive.