ManufacturingManufacturing companies can't see what's happening on the factory floor
We have worked with many manufacturing companies across their production lines, warehouses, plants, workshops and engineering teams, and find that many of them face the same sorts of problems. For example:
- Verifying regular hours, overtime hours, and breaks
- Ensuring staff are stationed in the correct zones
- Protecting lone workers, night workers, and engineers
- Redeploying people quickly when production needs change
- Preventing queues and delays at clock-in points
- Giving managers visibility across lines, zones and sites
Manufacturing requires careful planning, and tight timing, and even small delays or visibility gaps can significantly affect output, safety, and labour costs.
The factory floor is busy, and tight control is vital
The success of your business relies on your ability to meet your production quotas. But small delays and staffing shortages can quickly turn your careful planning on its head, which has a huge knock-on effect on productivity, safety, and costs.
The factory floor is super busy, with a lot going on. Shift changes can create queues at clock machines, workers may find themselves needing to move between lines or zones as production needs change, and staff shortages may mean you're inducting agency staff at short notice.
In such a busy environment, unless you can see what's happening, even small incidents can snowball into catastrophic consequences.
Lost Productivity
- Shift Delays. Large queues at clock machines or inefficient handovers create lost time before production can even begin.
- Slow Response. When a line needs support due to sudden sickness or new needs, managers need to know who is available.
- Zone Optimisation. Placing workers in zones they are not good at, or not trained for, affects production flow and safety.
Higher Costs
- Payroll Waste. When hours, overtime, or breaks are incorrectly recorded, your payroll bill increases by up to 4%.
- Agency Costs. Being unable to efficiently deploy your existing workforce increases reliance on expensive agency staff.
- Admin Burden. Your supervisors often need to work extra hours finding cover, verifying timesheets or handling disputes.
Staff Safety
- Unauthorised Working. Being unable to see if unqualified staff are working in restricted zones is a dangerous compliance risk.
- Emergency Response. During an incident or evacuation, managers need to know who is on site, and where they are.
- Lone Worker Risk. You need to know who is working alone, where they are, and when they were last verified as safe.
What successful manufacturing companies do differently
Although some companies try to solve these problems by hiring more supervisors, offering more overtime, or adding more clock machines, there is a better way. And the most successful companies are giving their supervisors, shift managers, and senior leaders technology that shares better real-time data from the factory floor – and even lets them automate some of the clunkiest manual tasks.
This reveals things like:
- Who is on site right now
- Which line each person is working at
- Whether staff are in the place they're meant to be
- Who is nearby to support urgent tasks
- Why certain lines, shifts, teams or sites perform better than others
- When each vulnerable worker was last verified as "safe"
Having this information easily available helps you to run tighter shifts, increase total output, reduce overheads, and protect your staff.
