Hello and welcome to another session of IndeavorTalks. In our last session, we talked about driving synergies between production and labor planning through digital means. Today, I want to dive deeper into the labor planning side and how it connects to what we call the People Operations Challenge. First off, People Operations is exactly what it sounds like and is a key piece in the fabric of a factory, which is made of manpower, machine, and material.
People Operations is all about daily and weekly workflows that enable a factory’s operations. Effective people operations can be directly attributed to improving production efficiency and mitigating overhead costs. Now, in a tight labor market, a volatile supply chain, and an environment that we’ve experienced since the 2020 pandemic, people operations have meant different things to different layers of any organization.
HR might see it as an issue of employee retention, i. e. we don’t have enough people to run the place. Continuous improvement might be seen as an issue of versatility, i.e., we have enough people but lack a diversely skilled workforce to operate the station. Manufacturing and ops excellence might see this as an issue of production volatilities (i.e., we don’t have enough people to run the place, the ones we do have need to be continuously upskilled, and if all else is right, the shipment might switch and we need the agility to meet our production targets under all these variables). In the middle of it all sits the frontline leadership who often find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time on non-value-added activities.
What we’re starting to see is these previously discrete interests finally converging. Everything I mentioned is an input to effective people operations. Each of these inputs at your organization might be housed in a does-it-all type of horizontal digital system on Excel sheets or maybe even on paper. It’s either too manual or too high-level. This is where verticalized digital platforms such as Indeavor play a crucial role in operationalizing these discrete inputs. For example, you might have a rock-solid LMS platform but may have no means to use that information in real time to drive labor planning compliance.
You might have a robust demand planning system but cannot convert those production targets to the required headcount. You may have a culture demanding better workforce participation, equitability, and transparency, but with no means to effectively offer these competitive incentives that give your business an edge. With Vertical Tools, you can effectively manage this complex web of operating procedures and give your frontline operations the tools to effectively leverage the necessary data to drive production floor decision-making. Furthermore, to break the cycle of operating hand to mouth, enable your enterprise to track the outcomes of this day-to-day planning via ecosystem integrations and level up your business strategy from tactical workforce planning to strategic people operations.
