April 2011 Newsletter

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The Impact of Compliance on True Product Cost

Last month we discussed how an automated workforce scheduling system ensures that your labor deployment precisely matches your production demands, thereby lowering the true cost of product on store shelves.

This month we focus on how workforce scheduling automation can have profound effects on a facility’s ability to increase labor rule compliance and reduce safety risks. In large and complex labor environments, front-line managers are faced with the difficult task of simultaneously maintaining plant policies, enforcing safety regulations, and honoring collective bargaining agreements. Compounding this challenge is applying these policies to a dynamic and often unpredictable workforce. Do you have the tools in place to consistently remain compliant?

Maintaining compliance to plant policies, whether they are driven by safety initiatives or procedural protocols, is essential to accomplishing business objectives. The difficulty in achieving success at these levels of plant policy compliance is that those policies themselves must comply with employee CBAs, and be maintained with respect to them. Managing these discrete areas of compliance thus becomes a complicated balancing act. A plant policy aimed at decreasing repetitive motion injuries for a specialized job, for instance, may come dangerously close to violating a union agreement regarding the employees’ right to work the highest paying job available.

From a CBA compliance perspective, inaccuracies or inequities in the scheduling process - real or perceived - result in higher instances of employee grievances and lowered employee morale. These inaccuracies limit a facility’s ability to enact and maintain policies that actually do comply with employee labor agreements. Moreover, the cost involved in processing each subsequent grievance directly adds to a facility’s cost of production, and erodes a facility’s competitive advantage.

Successfully managing the workforce in any regulated environment requires the precision necessary to support both policy initiatives and CBA compliance. The solution to aligning plant policies and employee agreements ultimately comes down to creating a workforce schedule that places the right employees in the right jobs according to their skill and ability. By doing this, productivity is improved and conformance to safety standards is met. With less downtime due to employee error or injury, facility managers can keep both human resources and production costs down.

Automating the workforce scheduling process significantly helps facilities consistently create accurate labor schedules that comply with CBA rules and regulations. By automating the mechanics of complex rules into the schedule, management can confidently make tactical decisions on the production floor that comply with plant policies and initiatives. By functioning within the boundaries of the rules, these policies can work at their highest level of efficiency.

Without an accurate tactical plan for maintaining compliance at all levels of the plant, front-line managers lack the ability to optimize their labor assignments according to complex rules. Workforce scheduling automation empowers a facility to consistently manage the complexity of balancing plant initiatives, collective bargaining agreements, and safety regulations. When plant initiatives and the parameters of employee agreements are equally balanced and accounted for in the scheduling process, facility management has the ability to effectively lower the labor cost impact on finished product.

Schedule a Demo

If you haven’t already seen a demonstration of our workforce scheduling solution, contact us today. We will show you how an agile workforce helps drive agile manufacturing.

sales@schedulesoft.com
1-800-416-9006

Upcoming Webcast

April 26th, 2011
2:00pm Eastern

Join us on a webcast hosted by Food Processing, April 26, at 2pm Eastern to learn how Nestlé Pizza is using ScheduleSoft to better manage their manufactuing operations.

Click here to register.