The current staffing shortages and hiring challenges that many manufacturing companies are experiencing aren’t exactly new problems for the industry.
According to a report from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, there are five million fewer people working in manufacturing in the US than there were 20 years ago. By 2030, experts project more than two million manufacturing jobs will be unfilled, four times as many openings as we have today.
If your business is struggling to find enough quality candidates to fill your plant, a logical alternative is to maximize labor and output from the valuable employees you do have. Based on our manufacturing scheduling experience, we have a few strategies to suggest.
Upgrade Equipment
If you need to rely more heavily on the reduced staff members you do have, it’s important to make sure they have the resources they need to work efficiently. As a first step, consider performing an audit of any equipment used by employees to identify machines that need to be repaired or replaced. Removing any potential roadblocks to their work will improve not only your team’s work environment, but also their performance. Making these improvements can help make up for the decreased labor and will also allow you to market enhanced working conditions to any future prospective hires.
Optimize Your Layout
In addition to upgrading equipment, your manufacturing business can also maximize existing labor by strategically updating the layout of the plant floor. For example, if employees currently have to walk a long distance to retrieve materials, or if storage space is being wasted, your plant may be missing opportunities to create a more efficient and intuitive workflow – which is something a smaller workforce will significantly benefit from. Developing an optimal plant floor may take time, but the long-lasting impact it can have on productivity and overall production output makes it a worthwhile investment.
Go to the Source
For the most pertinent information on how to provide support for your current employees, it’s best to ask them yourself. Through one-on-one interviews, focus groups, or surveys, talk to your team about their ideas and requests for resources that will make their jobs easier. Because they are the ones experiencing life at your plant every day, they often have the most valuable insight on potential improvements that you may never think of otherwise. Involving employees in planning conversations also lets them know they are a valued part of the company and gives them the satisfaction of seeing the larger impact of their efforts on your organization.
The Ideal Tool to Optimize Employee Schedules
In our experience, optimizing current employees’ schedules is a key strategy to maximize labor, though it’s extremely difficult to achieve manually. A scheduling tool, such as VirtECS®, can use existing data to allocate employees to the most optimal shifts. VirtECS® achieves these results by creating high-fidelity process models that indicate exactly where and when labor is needed. If your plant has been experiencing excessive overtime costs, this tool can account for production “hot spots” over a broad time window to spread the labor needs more evenly. VirtECS® also promotes collaboration among employees to analyze their labor usage and determine where production would benefit from more or less employee activity.
If your operation is still hoping to expand now or in the future, VirtECS® offers scenario analysis capabilities that can help HR departments target which key openings are the most important to fill first, allowing them to add the most capacity per workforce addition. This planned bootstrapping approach has become a true necessity for many industries dealing with both supply chain and labor constraints. The rapid ability of VirtECS® to respond to changing situations means that labor plans are always up to date. If you’d like to find out more about how to optimize employee schedules and hiring plans, we’d love to chat with you soon.
