Building and maintaining a skilled workforce is one of the top challenges manufacturers face today—and the skills gap is only going to increase as older workers look to retire. Not only this, but you also might be missing out on additional revenue streams because you can’t hire or keep employees fast enough to keep pace with increasing demands.
The logical thing to do is focus on making operational improvements. Reduce waste, automate processes, and squeeze out even more efficiency—but this only goes so far. What many manufacturers are doing instead of hiring outside is repurposing existing employees to take on higher value roles.
There are three ways you can do this:
1. Leverage Cloud Technology to Unlock People Potential
Many of your best employees spend a lot of their time on mundane tasks like manual cycle counting, inventory management, software/server maintenance, or running business and production reports. These are business-critical activities that need to be taken care of but many manufacturers have found a more effective and efficient way to manage them. The right Software-as-a Service (SaaS) cloud solution automates these activities, and essentially eliminates the need to allocate people to get them done—what’s even more appealing is you’ll do away with human errors and get more accurate information.
2. Engage Employees with Access to Critical Data
To really tackle the issue of worker shortage, you need to do more than reallocate people to new jobs. Giving more of your employees better access to critical business data means they’ll be able to be more efficient and more collaborative. With more accurate data, they can develop better work processes for less one-off manual processes outside the system that could introduce errors.
3. Go “Digital” to Keep Younger Talent
Using SaaS-based cloud solutions can create new opportunities for existing employees to also prevent employee churn—especially with younger workers. They have grown up as digital natives. The applications they use are largely run in the cloud, and they think mobility first. The new generation of manufacturing employee is not going to be tethered to a workstation or accept green screens and archaic user experiences. And if your competition has more modern systems, that’s where they’ll go.
See examples of manufacturers who have followed these three ways to meet the skilled worker shortage challenge head on. Download the white paper: 3 Ways to Solve the Manufacturing Headcount Shortage and Meet Customer Demand.
Sponsored By:
