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… Read more »
Posts By: Terry Schilling
From ERP to Labor Scheduling
Creating a labor schedule is a key engineering step in your production planning cycle. Given your multiple products and deadlines over multiple shifts, days or weeks and given the volatility of any pool of labor resources, can your production plans be completed on time? Whether work orders are created in QAD, SAP or Preactor, now… Read more »
Implementation – Early Payback
Even if an application appears to really meet one’s needs, there is always the challenge of implementation. A financial manager for Coca-Cola recently asked, “This application looks like it will do the job but answer this: how much trouble will we uncover when it comes to implementation?” He was specifically referring to the resistance that… Read more »
Extra Man? Right or Wrong
In large manufacturing facilities, it’s not hard to find managers who’ll acknowledge, on any given day, there may be extra workers on the floor. Sometimes referred to as redundant manning this sounds like an easy target when looking for labor waste. But is it? Yes and no. Here’s the difference. Under certain circumstances having an… Read more »
Labor Scheduling Best Practices / Past Practices
What are the “Best Practices” (BP) for workforce scheduling? Most managers in operations and HR would like to see these documented. But what is BP? BP is a method, process, or activity, which conventional wisdom regards as more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other method, process, etc. when applied to, in this… Read more »
Skills Inventory = Institutional Knowledge
An Automated Labor Scheduling (ALS) solution is only as good as the data it uses and here’s the data we’re going to need. There are five different types of data: 1. Production Plans 2. Jobs 3. Employees 4. Absences 5. Skills Inventory Although there’s more to be covered, Production Plans are addressed in our blog… Read more »