Manufacturers constitute a broad church. Some employ just a handful, others hundreds of thousands. Their geographical reach might be a few miles or global. And the labour force ranges from Generation Z individuals just embarking on their careers through Millennials and Gen X to the Boomers now approaching retirement (but many are not yet there – nearly a quarter of manufacturing workers are aged 55 or over).
All manufacturers, though, must rise to the twin challenges of cost control and regulatory compliance. CEOs, directors, managers, and supervisors must ensure that production continues consistently and efficiently daily, without breaching regulations, across the business.
How can they swiftly and reliably identify issues in the production process and put them right? How can they optimise their labour for maximum efficiency? How can they ensure that all regulatory requirements are consistently fulfilled in every area?
Data-driven visibility
The answer to all these questions, and a host of others, lies in one word: visibility.
Considerable advances in recent years in data-driven analytics combined with technologies such as machine learning are today enabling manufacturers to analyse and understand, in detail, the realities of every aspect of their operations. Having visibility by gathering data across the manufacturing operations can unlock insights and help identify areas of improvement which were impossible to find otherwise.
There are several ways of finding these insights, and each way has its benefits. Let us take a look at three such practices manufacturers can implement.
1. Analysing granular levels of data
Knowing how much your business operations are costing in total is one thing. Knowing how those costs break down by department and activity, how they vary from month to month or week to week, and how and why they differ from one region to another is quite another.
With the ability to visualise all this and more, manufacturers can see how productively they are consuming labour hours, which plants and production lines are efficient and where wastage is occurring. With this intelligence, they can investigate and rectify issues, reorganising resources to cut costs and improve return on labour investment.
Real-time access to plant operations provides a clear view of production flow and can uncover the reasons behind production downtime. Who is doing what, when and where? What are the current trends in absenteeism? What gaps have arisen in today’s schedules, and who can plug them in? With the correct information, managers and supervisors can make better, faster decisions, maintaining productivity and cutting unnecessary costs.
Similarly, such visibility can help manufacturers identify likely regulatory breaches before they occur. For example, workforce management systems can prevent labour compliance issues which could happen due to scheduling errors. Automated systems can identify such issues and bring them to the attention of managers to stop such mistakes from happening at all by stopping scheduling decisions which could cause them, ensuring, for example, that no one is scheduled to work for longer than working time regulations allow, or to handle a task for which they are not qualified.
2. Facilitating feedback from the workforce
Ongoing feedback from the labour force is key to understanding the issues that affect them – availability of raw materials and equipment failures for example – as well as their own motivations, attitudes, and concerns. All of these can impact costs, productivity, employee experience and compliance.
Mobile devices, with which we are all already familiar and comfortable, can be used to provide information, both proactively and in response to requests. This further improves management visibility into business operations, helping reduce costs, enhancing compliance, and improving employee engagement and sentiment, making it clear to workers that their views and feedback are valued.
The financial benefits of opening such communications channels should not be underestimated: Gallup reports the global cost of poor worker engagement at no less than US$ 7.8 trillion.
3. Leverage automation to track and act
Visibility into complete operations and access to data can enable automation in a wide range of business processes. Automating activities such as time tracking can pay dividends, reducing the risk of compliance failure while optimising both costs and management efforts focused on high-value activities. Letting software tools act based on pre-configured criteria to take decisions on routine tasks and to notify supervisors/managers/operation directors can enable the fastest resolution, ensuring maximum uptime of your production lines.
Automation can help in diverse ways:
- Automating the tracking and administration of paid and unpaid leave policies and ensuring their consistent enforcement across the business
- Automating tracking of employee health and safety standards adherence
- Adjusting compensation models to reflect changing national and local requirements
- Informing accruals to account for specific time off, such as required sick time and time to care for ill family members
- Tracking the consumption of new crisis-related leave types in real-time and reporting on them to show how the business is affected
- Automating tracking of compliance with new health and safety policies and union rules
These capabilities enable more accurate forecasting and scheduling and simplify labour compliance by leveraging historical and current data. With time tracked precisely, wages can be paid with fewer errors, improving employee relations, and reducing surprise costs at audit time.
These are just three examples of how better visibility is helping manufacturers control costs and improve compliance.
To find out more about enhancing visibility and how automation can help, visit https://www.ukg.co.uk/industry-solutions/manufacturing