Tugboat Software Blog

January 26, 2012

One of our General Mills customers recently re-bid 96 jobs. This was due to installation of some new equipment. When they’ve had to do this in the past, with a workforce of over 400, this was an administrative nightmare: the workers filling out individual bid sheets, sorting through the bids, ranking them in seniority order, awarding new bids. Then due to bumping, they’d have to do it over again figuring jobs that needed to be re-bid.

Tugboat’s recently launched tools have automated this entire process. A staffing level planning tool enables management to plan the number of needed jobs. It automatically posts the new jobs to a job bidding window which is available to all employees via Tugboat’s self-service portal. This allows employees to do the rest by themselves. The bids stay open for two weeks so they can also cancel and prioritize their bids. The bids are processed automatically when the bidding closes. All this with no paper!

Had they continued doing this by hand, explains the General Mills scheduler, it would have taken over 2 month.  “It made our life a lot better. Tugboat got us through the bidding process more accurately. A planner’s dreams come true”.

Does this situation occur with your workforce? When the workforce is increased or decreased in size? Or for simple open jobs when someone leaves the workforce?

Amongst pressures faced by manufacturing operations today, matching the size of one’s workforce to their projected production requirements is a growing challenge. Tugboat’s new job bidding tools include a labor planning interface that manages the desired number of jobs for each department and shift. Users can develop a list of minimum jobs required during both slow and peak times to assist in determining their desired staffing plan. Once these levels are set, available job assignments are posted for job bidding to existing employees on the employee Kiosk. Tugboat’s workforce scheduling solution will also automatically awards the new job assignments according to HR policies.

What makes this challenging for larger operations is that typically scores of employees, or more, are affected. They refer to this as ‘furlough and recall’. If people are furloughed, job assignments for the remaining workforce have to be reset. However, any job assignment changes must conform to existing union or HR-policy rules, so. There’s a ripple effect on other workers as senior workers bid for jobs now that the workforce has been reduced. Similarly, during a re-hire multiple new jobs are opened up and again current senior workers are entitled to bid on these new jobs. This again has a ripple effect.

Tugboat’s tools enable employees to bid on job assignments during a downsizing or bid on new positions when production is again increased. Tightly integrated with Tugboat’s labor scheduling solution, these tools considerably reduce the workload for HR and front-line managers by placing responsibility for job bidding in the hands of each worker. Tugboat’s proprietary optimization engine will automatically assign new job positions according to all of the Customer’s site-specific labor scheduling rules while conforming to their job bidding policies and planning goals.

We’ve also developed this new software so that it is tightly integrated with Tugboat’s skills management solution. Workers assigned to new jobs, are automatically signed up for any needed on-the-job training.