The manufacturing industry’s skills shortage problem has persisted and evolved during the global pandemic. Quit levels in manufacturing are the highest they’ve been in 20 years.
There’s no dispute that this is creating challenges. Today, about nine in 10 manufacturers say they have unfilled positions for which they’re struggling to find qualified applicants. Clearly, a skills shortage this widespread isn’t a challenge you can hire your way out of—not as you try to keep up with demand, while managing inflation and supply chain disruptions.
You need a productivity strategy that develops and strengthens your workforce by empowering and helping employees work more efficiently.
When experienced workers retire, you risk losing critical knowledge about your production processes and assets. You need to capture or recreate this knowledge and make it available to the next generation of workers to help them be productive and effective in their roles.
Jobs can go unfilled for months, so managers need to enable workers to perform smarter, faster, and better. A combination of flexible training tools, digital technologies, and workforce support can help. With a limited staff, temporarily pulling workers from their jobs may not be feasible. But more flexible training tools are available: E-learning offers self-paced programs at a time and place that works best for everyone.
It may also be time to evaluate your existing training curriculum to make sure it’s based on data and defined needs. Start with a skills/knowledge gap assessment. Then, you can develop a tailored training approach that matches employee needs and aligns with business goals. Over time, you can collect pre- and post-training data to measure its effectiveness and adjust it as needed.
Digital automation technology is what younger workers are trained on and expect to use on the job—and it can help them be more productive. By turning raw production data into contextualized insights, analytics help operators of all experience levels better understand what’s happening. Some control devices have built-in predictive algorithms that alert staff of potential component failures.
Digital technology can also simplify maintenance. With a digital twin of a machine, maintenance teams can view digital diagnostics overlaid on a physical machine using an augmented reality (AR) tool. This can help them diagnose the root cause of stoppages or access step-by-step repair instructions in real time.
Remote connectivity flourished during the pandemic, and will continue to play a big role by transforming how team members collaborate. When on-site production staff, especially less experienced workers, have access to on-demand support, they can get questions answered faster.
Third-party providers are evolving to play a bigger, more active role to help fill gaps. For example, integrated services can be woven into daily operations to help reduce and prevent downtime—whether it’s remote support, parts management, or on-site engineering.
In one case, a paper mill used remote support to augment on-site maintenance to provide 24/7 monitoring of more than 2,000 machine data points, consultation on machine changes, and quarterly performance reviews. The team helped work through production issues and resolve problems before they turned into failures. This helped the mill achieve 91 percent uptime.
You can only transform productivity if you’re willing to shake up training methods and the use technology and services to support production staff. Be ready to fight for budgetary and process changes that prioritize productivity and preventative maintenance. Breaking tradition can be an uphill effort, but your people are worth the fight.
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