Companies must continue to lower their operating costs and increase productivity just to survive in today’s competitive marketplace. But where do you start when you can’t even plan production levels for the next month, let alone next quarter or next year? Facing this high degree of economic uncertainty, you may be asking questions like these:

• Will demand for our products change? In which direction and by how much?

• Has the shape or timing of our customer demand changed?

• If demand changes, how will that affect the workload in my shiftwork operations?

• Do we need to change staffing levels to meet the new production requirements?

• Can we change the staffing levels to lower costs?

• If we change staffing levels to lower costs, how do we continue to meet our customer's needs?

• Does this mean that we should back off from our 24x7 shift schedule?

• What is the cost for not changing?

You may have worked very hard to create a 24x7 culture. If you back off from continuous operations, you may feel as though you’ve wasted all the efforts to implement the 24x7 schedule. The fact is: shift schedules that don't match the workload are very expensive. So, regardless of the economic conditions, you need to have the right schedule in place.

Lowering costs

Effectively managing your shiftwork operation will lower costs. Matching the schedule to the actual coverage required is a good place to start. A properly designed schedule will improve your ability to utilize labor resources effectively, and lower the cost to produce or deliver your products.

When cost cutting is the goal, staffing levels are often the first item looked at. However, you shouldn't limit your focus to staffing levels alone. There are other opportunities to improve productivity and lower the labor cost per unit of production. These include:

• Shift-to-shift communication practices. Smooth shift handoffs allow operating efficiency to be maintained throughout day, improving labor and asset utilization.
• Shift routines. Do machines need to be cleaned after every shift, or should they be cleaned only when they are dirty? End-of-shift cleaning routines often become an excuse to line up at the time clock at the end of shift.
• Maintenance scheduling and production scheduling conflicts.
• Unnecessarily starting and stopping equipment at breaks, lunches, and shift change. This can lower quality, increase equipment breakage and downtime, and results in lost time to perform the stop/start routine.
• Travel time and unauthorized break extensions result in lost time, production, and poorer service.

The cost of change vs. the cost of not changing

Changing shift schedules often has a cost. Shiftworkers build their lifestyle around their current schedule. Changing the schedule has a personal impact for them - either positive or negative. Preparing the workforce to make the change requires careful and complete communication. The “hard” cost here is the communication meeting time, and the “soft” cost is the stress that some shiftworkers will experience because they have a difficulty making changes in their personal lives.

What about the cost of not making a change? One of the biggest costs is the non-productive hours that can be eliminated with a better schedule. The high cost of wages and benefits makes idle time caused by inefficient scheduling very expensive. For example, if you have 300 employees making $15/hour, a 5% mismatch between the required coverage hours and the scheduled hours would cost about $468,000/year for wages alone.

Call us Today

Shiftwork Solutions can help you evaluate your business requirements from a shift schedule perspective.  This allows you to implement a schedule that fits those requirements today and into the future.  Call us today at (415) 472-3688 or click here to ask us a question.

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