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 slow and peak times to assist in determining their desired staffing plan. Once these levels are set, available job assignments are posted for job bidding to existing employees on the employee Kiosk. Tugboat’s workforce scheduling solution will also automatically awards the new job assignments according to HR policies.
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.