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.

When it comes to those that actually do the scheduling, most would rather do things the way they’ve been doing them – even if there is a little inefficiency and maybe hidden costs due to some redundancies. When it comes to the workforce, most will naturally want to avoid changes in how jobs are assigned. However assigning them more efficiently takes some analysis of the rules and policies that control how the workforce is currently scheduled.

So how do we implement a fully automated application like SOS without running into resistance from the schedulers and the workforce? Along with getting the data for jobs and people in place, a project usually starts with focus on the existing scheduling rules. However, there’s a lot more to automation than getting all the rules and policies analyzed and here’s a way forward.

Right from the start, even from the Internet at home, Tugboat’s solution enables workers to make requests for:

•    Overtime

•    Days off

•    Vacations

•    Training

•    Open jobs

This interface also makes reports easily available to the workers for:

•    Absences

•    Requests

•    Available OT

•    Scheduled jobs

This is a two-stage approach and it takes the pressure for change off of the schedulers. Automating requests and reports means, right from the start, less paper and less discussion with each and every worker. And the workforce? Automating requests and reports will make life on-the-job a little easier without raising questions about how jobs are assigned. It’s called empowerment. For management, the cost of getting to this level of implementation is fairly low. Having data for your existing workers and jobs uploaded into the application is all that’s required.

To summarize: save the challenge of analyzing and documenting all your rules and policies until a later stage. Get the easy stuff in and running for an early payback and buy-in from the workforce

Under certain circumstances having an extra body on a line is a good thing. Any machine can get a little quirky and require an extra pair of hands and eyes just to get the product down the line. There are appropriate times and places when extra manning makes sense, so. Any automated labor scheduling solution must enable an override for human judgement. However when this becomes an habitual alternative to your standard manning, something isn’t right.

If say the labor standard for an operation is 10 workers, yet some supervisors are only comfortable with 11, then management has a couple of choices. Pay for the 10% premium above the standard or adjust the standard upward. In other words, if this needs to happen every day or every shift, then change the labor standard to 11.

A solution that allows the scheduler to make special assignments, assignments that typically fall outside of the basic manning for building the schedule for a particular product, will highlight these non-standard assignments. What’s often missing from any manual labor scheduling solution are these kinds of tools that enable management to point out special assignment situations.

Building labor standards that reflect your actual requirements is a key part of your focus on skill management. Most importantly, labor standards must reflect your best tribal knowledge about how the most efficient manning for each and every section on your manufacturing floor. When using an automated scheduling solution, your labor standards are built into the system and are automatically put in place with each schedule. As a result, the kind of habitual overmanning highlighted above can be eliminated.

What happens when a supervisor cherry-picks a specific worker for a given position? This is not just a version of the special assignment problem we’ve been discussing? Training is where we need to look for help here. If there is only one worker capable of manning the position, where’s their backup? What happens when they’re on vacation? This points to the need for training management and training planning being tightly integrated with workforce scheduling and not just for new hires.

Temps are an ideal resource when balancing the ups-&-downs of production demand with a finite labor capacity. Using Temps is more cost-effective than having to fill open jobs with overtime. So eliminating the use of Temps altogether is not practical. However, relying on Temps indicates that one’s existing work force is not being used in an optimal manner. And this is an indirect indicator of labor waste. If you can meet your production demand by using your existing work force in an optimal manner, the use of Temps is reduced and your overall labor cost goes down.

How? We used optimization to find the best possible match between the skills inventory available with the customer’s hourly workers and, on the other side, the labor demand required to meet their production requirements.

Tugboat’s customer operates a prepared-meals manufacturing facility with about 800 regular hourly workers. They were using 20 to 40 Temps every day. Using Tugboat’s scheduling engine to do the crewing automatically the number of Temps was cut to 10 a day.

Measuring Labor Waste

In this case, the cost of labor waste is very easy to measure. Before Tugboat’s solution 20 to 40 Temps. After, 10. Temps may not sound expensive, but. The savings calculates out to at least $207,000 per year. (How would you like to take part of that home as a bonus?)

Here’s how we arrived at that number. Using the conservative estimate for reducing Temps from 20 to 10, that’s 10 fewer Temps. At $10.35 per hour, the cost of a Temp comes to $82.80 for an 8 hour work day. Multiply by 10 Temps, 5 days a week, and 50 weeks and we get to $207,000 per year. And, this should be easy to verify. Finance can report the cost of their temporary labor force from any prior period and compare it to the costs for the current period.

Posted by Terry Schilling, VP Marketing & Sales