Improving Operational Efficiency: Part 4

Labor Resource Planning

Every organization is constrained by the resources available to them. Utilizing those resources effectively is a key to success. 

Manufacturing is constrained by labor, raw material availability and equipment scheduling. The ability to optimize any one of these can make a big difference in helping your company’s bottom line. Labor is often overlooked in the planning process but a key element.

Gaining insight into how much labor is needed to complete a job, enables your scheduler to match labor resources to production requirements efficiently. 

  

Key questions to monitoring labor include: 

• Do have enough people to complete a job in a timely manner? 
• What adjustments need to be made to avoid unnecessary overhead?
• Can I extend, delay or consolidate work to avoid overtime?
• Do I have any upcoming bottlenecks? Can I move jobs from high volume days to level the workload and avoid a conflict that could strain limited resources?
• Can I reduce the cost of Training new workers?
• Can I reduce the complications caused by over staffing a project, such as excessive layers of communication?

Vicinity helps process manufacturers get the most out of their labor resources.  Vicinity records labor standards by formula. By setting a standard requirement Vicinity can calculate how many labor hours will be needed to execute the schedule and identify resource bottlenecks. This allows the scheduler to match the labor force to meet production demand reducing surges and lulls in production time. Bringing the labor requirements into the scheduling process will save your scheduler time and your company money with a very quick return.