According to the reports, many manufacturers have reported high employee attrition rates post-Covid-19 impact. Generally, employees’ churn rate is high for those companies where employees don’t have enough opportunities to grow, fear cultural change, or lack safety standards in the environment.
In the case of the Manufacturing industry, fear of cultural change and safety challenges top the list. Also, if the employees can’t perform to their potential, this can impact their morale and make them decide against the company.
So, retaining the employees is a must, and manufacturers must rethink their strategy and planning to engage and reduce employee attrition rates.
Of the different techniques to achieve this, modernizing the shop floor is considered a killer option to engage and improve employee performance.
Here, in this post, I will detail how modernizing your shop floor operations will improve employee morale, efficiency, and engagement to take your manufacturing business to the next level.
Before getting started, it is a must to understand how a shop floor operates and what challenges employees face.
Shop floor and employee efficiency connectivity -Challenges
The shop floor is the heart of any manufacturing unit as most critical operations happen there. A wide array of processes occur on the shop floor: production, data collection from machines, task allocation to employees, updating data to supervisor, machine health checkups, availability of machines, machine maintenance, employee shift rotations, etc.
All or most of the processes shared above are manual, and this leads to lots of chaos. Starting from allotting tasks and switching job cards for different shifts is a demanding task for supervisors and is backbreaking. Delays in the task allocation or improper allocation of job cards lead to chaos, impacting the production on the shop floor.
On the other hand, data collection from the machines is even more challenging as employees capture data from machines when operating at their peak to ensure the machine’s efficiency. The productivity loss on a shop floor doesn’t always depend on the employee’s efficiency but on the machine’s efficiency too.
If your machines are not performing to their potential or aged, then there are chances their efficiency may not be up to the mark. This can impact productivity. If you complete the data collection and analysis part manually, your supervisors will have difficulty in realizing whose problem it is, either the machine or humans.
Working on a faulty machine and being unable to meet the production deadline may significantly hurt employee morale.
This can force the employee to leave the company in no time.
Similarly, checking the machine’s health regularly and scheduling machine maintenance requires some effort and money. According to reports, one-third of the manufacturing cost is spent on machine repairs and health checkups.
If your employees perform these tasks manually, they will never have the right data to discover the current state of the machine and when it will break down or fail.
This again impacts employee morale and mood.
As the entire shop floor operations rely on humans and machines, manufacturers need to rethink their strategies to engage humans with advanced solutions and enable them to capture real-time data from the machines to improve efficiency.
This is where shop floor automation kicks in. Modernizing your shop floor with advanced technologies like IoT, AI, RPA, and Mobile applications will enable your employees to perform their operations better and boost their morale.
It is a misconception that modernizing factories will impact the employee performance, as many resist cultural change. It’s not true. If you can sit and talk to your employees about the potential benefits of the digital transformation solutions and their benefits in the right way, most of them will understand and appreciate the initiative. Most companies fail in this part.
The right digital transformation partner or shop floor implementation partner for your shop floor automation program can help you achieve the above results without hassle.
Let’s discuss how modernizing your shop floor engages employees better and boosts shop floor operations.
Shop floor modernization and employee engagement
1. IoT for data collection
Capturing and evaluating the machine’s and employee’s efficiency matters for improving shop floor operations. Manual or traditional systems will no longer serve this purpose. They pose two challenges: capturing the machine’s efficiency when it is operating at its peak is almost impossible and employees trying to measure the efficiency may be a safety risk.
This is where the Internet of Things or IoT kicks in. If you can implement the IoT devices to the machines, they can easily capture the machine data automatically and pass it to the Cloud to process and analyze. The analyzed data provides the machine’s health and performance trends, which will help you identify the efficiency rate of machines and humans.
This in turn, helps the supervisors or managers to evaluate the efficiency quickly as the data is captured in real-time.
Also Read: EHS Management System for Work Place & Employee Safety
2. AI and Cloud for machine maintenance
The real-time data collected for a few months can then be used to analyze the pattern of the machine’s operations and analyzing the trends will help you identify the problems in the machine with respect to failures, breakdowns, or aging. Making subsequent decisions is relatively easy if you have the correct data.
The data collected from IoT is fed into the Cloud for processing, and the data is analyzed using the AI and ML programs. The advanced technology projects the trends in a dashboard via visual charts or digital values, using which you can schedule the machine maintenance of replacement quickly and efficiently.
A huge advantage of using AI and ML on the manufacturing shop floor is it can significantly reduce machine maintenance costs and cut down unnecessary spending on machine replacements without any need for them.
As you can measure the efficiency of machines and employees distinctly, you don’t have to worry about the employee churn rate. As these technologies streamline the entire process, employees will not have to worry about sudden task allocations, data capture, or additional manual tasks impacting their daily operations and morale.
Conclusion
The advancement of technologies is transforming the manufacturing industry significantly, and empowering the shop floor workforce with the right set of tools and technologies will help them perform their operations seamlessly and with maximum efficiency.
A satisfied employee can take your business operation to the next level and significantly contribute to your business’s success.
Start engaging your employees with advanced technologies. Streamline the process, and provide them with real-time data to uplift their morale.
Are you looking for help? Need advice regarding shop floor automation?
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