How to prioritize manufacturing employee’s time
54% of manufacturers are having trouble finding qualified candidates, up from 38% in 2020. Labor and talent is a day-to-day challenge. People aren’t turning up for work, sometimes without notice, something that’s been amplified recently with the resurgence of Covid. Turnover is also up 15% when compared to 2020. So how do you prioritize the limited labor time?
Prioritizing your team’s limited time where it can have the greatest impact is critical - not just in today’s environment of labor and talent shortages, but also for the long term. In this blog, we’ll dig into best practices to identify and align your team around the actions that will have the greatest impact on the plant floor. Specifically, we’ll share examples of how other companies identify and address the top causes of downtime to move the needle on throughput and margin.
Engage Your Team in Prioritization
Getting your team involved in the solutions encourages engagement and ultimately leads to better adoption of the solutions. This in turn can motivate your team and improve your retention rates. You can get the team involved in:
Identifying the top problems
Track, tag, and visually display the top causes of downtime so that everyone can see what’s really happening. Avoid finger-pointing and guesswork by tracking in a systematic way and leveraging technology solutions to create a single-source of truth.
Creating a game plan
Direct employee’s attention to the right place at the right time. Eliminate wasted time and effort with a single-source of information. When people have a shared understanding of top causes of downtime, you can build in regular practices of reviewing the information and making sure that people focus their efforts where it’s most needed.
Let’s see what this looks like in practice.
One manufacturing plant we work with had set up the ability to track all the incidences of downtime across their most critical lines. In every morning team meeting, they would roll up the top causes of downtime and see what was holding them back the most. What they identified was that there was enough difference in changeover time as they moved from one product to another, that it added up to a $680,000 loss in revenue. By using a prioritization process and having the team identify the causes they were able to implement better changeover processes and get that revenue added back to their bottom line.
Get Started
If you’d like to get started with data-driven insights into where you should be prioritizing your team’s time, contact us for a free consultation session today.