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Labor: An Asset or a Liability?
Your business strategy should be what drives your labor scheduling but in reality, for most manufacturers, labor acts as a constraint to their production output. Using a scheduling system that does not directly support your finite production schedule is like running your facility with a line down. It can be done, but your output is limited and your labor is under-utilized.
Without a direct connection to your production output:
- How can you be sure you have the appropriate labor complement for what you are producing?
- How can you truly align production to consumer demand without being able to match an available and qualified workforce to that production plan?
In today’s consumer driven market, scheduling the workforce is a critical part of the availability of your product to the end consumer. If your labor scheduling doesn’t support your overall business objectives, you are not competing at the level you could be.
Automated scheduling software delivers the potential for organizations to realize considerable financial benefits. While software alleviates administrative work, and builds greater visibility into workforce deployment, your return on investment depends upon how well your software executes your overall business strategy.
- Is your software solution specifically designed to optimize straight time labor assignments, thereby reducing total overtime?
- Does your software solution automatically optimize labor assignments to ensure that your highest-margin products receive the most attention?
- Can you count on your software solution to reduce changeover downtime by optimizing labor assignments to your facility’s physical layout?
Software designed to simply process a list of rules is not equipped to address these kinds of questions or the critical business drivers of a complex, continuous manufacturing environment. How much money is your current or prospective scheduling software leaving on the table?
Our recent newsletters have focused on the benefits of employing software to handle complex labor challenges. Software certainly eases administrative scheduling burdens, and increases worker deployment visibility. These benefits are directly related to having clearly organized results from a software-based scheduling solution. The often overlooked factor in a successful software solution is exactly how those results were reached. Does your software make processing decisions aimed at realizing your business strategy, or does it simply execute basic scheduling rules? The answer to this question says a lot about how your organization manages operational change, and the amount of quantifiable benefits you’re reaping from your software investment.
One of the main distinctions between scheduling software solutions is whether or not the results are optimized. In a basic sense, optimization is built around the idea that there can be multiple answers to a particular question or problem. In some solutions, the goal may be to simply provide a single answer out of many possible answers. For instance, you want an employee to perform three tasks, A, B, & C, but require that A always comes first. Depending on the day, the solution may generate the work sequence of A-B-C or A-C-B. Both answers are equally suitable in this scenario. More refined solutions may be designed to pick the “best” of all possible answers. In a manufacturing environment, there may be dozens of possible job assignment options for a given shift. The best possible staffing combination might maximize straight time assignments based on employee availability, employee qualifications, and the current production schedule.
By contrast, non-optimized solutions are built upon the idea that there is only one available answer to a particular question or problem. Non-optimized schedule generation follows a rigid, prescribed set of business rules. These rules follow a clear line of progression that ultimately determines each employee’s assignment. There may be a facility rule, for instance, stating that workers will be assigned to their #1 preferred job according to seniority. It’s quite possible that honoring these preferences results in three employees without assignments, and three vacant positions. The low-senior employees without assignments lack the qualifications to work the three remaining unstaffed jobs. A non-optimized solution makes no attempt to reshuffle the initial assignment combination to ensure that all available workers have a productive job. The result is that three employees are laid off, while overtime is issued to cover the three vacant positions. While non-optimized solutions have their place in certain applications, their rigidity forces many companies to simply live and die by their system’s automated schedule results.
The flexibility of optimized scheduling solutions provides a great opportunity for facility management to deliver meaningful change to the status quo. Much of this revolves around the amount of operational change involved in implementing optimized solutions. If an organization is replacing a fixed set of deterministic scheduling rules with a more fluid, sophisticated set of practices, its workforce is likely to be skeptical of the change. Although the new assignments contribute to a more efficient mix of labor deployment for the day, employees may initially perceive the changes as erroneous. The good news is that optimized solutions deliver significant, quantifiable results. Sharing these results with your employees helps them understand how changes to their daily routines actually strengthen the company’s competitive edge. If a solution was designed to drive down labor costs without reducing headcount, show them how their efforts have increase efficiency and saved jobs. If a solution was designed to optimize labor deployment to the highest speed production lines, show them how their efforts have improved overall output. Optimized solutions deliver the capacity to build operational confidence in both workers and management alike.
As labor scheduling software becomes ubiquitous in complex, 24/7 environments, more and more pressure will build around how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. While all software options in the market will certainly aid in handling the nuts and bolts of schedule administration, a provider’s ability to optimize your assignments will largely determine the size of your investment return. Your commitment to implementing changes to the status quo, and the work involved in making optimization part of your operating culture, will have profound effects on your company’s long term viability.
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