Save Your Skilled Employees with Automation
Good Employees Are Hard to Find
As manufacturers, we need to realize that our employees feel automation as a threat. We must listen to them and show them at automation is a positive change to their jobs and not a negative. We as business owners and managers, must realize that our employees are our most significant asset to our company and finding the right ones is the hardest part of our job. “Executives reported it takes an average of 70 days to recruit skilled production workers and six out of 10 positions in manufacturing remained unfilled due to talent shortages.” The statistics do not lie, and if you ask any HR professional or staffing agency, they would tell you the same thing. Finding good people is difficult regardless of location, service, or pay. So, let us pose the question, “If finding good people is so hard, why are we not utilizing the people we already have in place?” Call them what you want, aged, tenured, or seasoned, the employees have been working in your facility for the longest time have the most knowledge, experience, and fear of any of your other employees. What will they do if they lose their job? Who wants to hire an employee that only has 5-10 years left in their working career when you can try and find someone that is more trainable with 20+ years remaining? The oxymoronic notion just mentioned is the fact that you are getting rid of your most knowledgeable employee as a trade-in for the least qualified.Acknowledge Your Assets
Knowing you have valuable employees with a significant amount of experience and knowledge, as a business owner and manager, you should want to protect these employees. However, protecting your aging work force is costing you profitability. I am not saying get rid of these employees, but rather I am saying that you are missing out on an opportunity to advance your workforce by adding automation and reallocating your tenured employees, re-skilling, retraining, and re-identifying your business culture. Adding automation to a manufacturing facility has many synergistic qualities that are overlooked. There are the obvious reasons like reducing cost of production, increasing throughput, minimizing human errors, increasing moral, eliminating extra waste, mitigating stress, adding margin dollars, and lastly retaining employees. It is our job to turn to page “Industry 4.0” and embrace the positive change that comes with adding automation.Benefits of Adding Automation
While we understand the obvious reasons, let us now consider the hidden benefits of adding automation and why they are important:- Improved worker safety
- Reduced lead times
- More competitive pricing
- Increased quality
- Smaller environmental footprint
- Better production planning
- Reduced need for outsourcing
- New jobs
- More reliable tolerances
- Acquiring new job skills
- Faster set-ups on next processes
- Networked metric visibility
- Added employees
- More appealing workplace
- Better benefits
- Eliminates repetitive boring work
- Redesigned floor space for utilization
- Employee advancement
