How WorkForce Enhances Manufacturing Workforce Management

Optimizing 24/7 Manufacturing: How Smart Workforce Management Drives Efficiency and Retention

You’ve got plants running three shifts across multiple continents. Someone in Chakan, India, just no-showed for a 2nd shift and a supervisor is mass texting the team for a replacement. Your compliance officer is worried about labor law violations in European Union. And your scheduling team is clinging to Excel like it’s their life preserver (instead of an anchor).

Sound familiar? If so, those circumstances can aggravate the sea of challenges KPMG is hearing about from leaders across the sector:

• 60% reported a decrease in gross margins
• 25% are experiencing margin drops greater than 6% to 10%
• 83% expect to raise prices in the next six months
• 50%+ are in the seven-to-twelve-month process of reconfiguring their supply chains

For companies that maintain 24/7 production schedules, there’s a high likelihood these risks to the bottom line will compound fast, spiking expenses if left unaddressed.

Smart manufacturing workforce management strategies need intelligent systems that can manage the entire workforce lifecycle. With platforms like WorkForce Software, leaders can maintain efficiency, keep employees engaged, and keep stringent control on their costs.

Here’s what you need to :

Time and Attendance Management: Automating the Basics, Elevating the Results

Companies that run shifts 24/7 or have a distributed workforce need more than just digital time and attendance tools. They need precise systems that can consolidate data for work hours, breaks, absences, overtime, and accrual balances in one place. Because when you have a comprehensive view of your total team’s timekeeping, you can prevent significant labor cost overruns or expensive compliance violations.

With tight budgets, leaders need a real-time view into time captures and gross payroll calculations to avoid needless pay leakage. WorkForce Software offers that transparency along with alert capabilities to prevent undesirable or noncompliant time tracking. Manufacturers with distributed teams might not intuitively recognize when an employee is working outside their shift, especially if they operate across time zones. WorkForce’s Software Time and Attendance capabilities can send alerts to prevent employees from working outside of their scheduled hours. And if you are a union shop, you can calibrate the time and attendance package to enforce clock-in/clock-out discipline within union guidelines.

If you’re running a distributed team, your organization needs configurations that evolve as quickly as labor laws, pay rules, and attendance policies. WorkForce Software allows manufacturers to access pre-built best practice templates, simplifying the process of managing across different states and regions.

Employee Scheduling: Precision Planning for Round-the-Clock Operations

found that high-quality work schedules contributed to workers feeling financially secure, enjoying work-life balance, and reporting overall job satisfaction. In their study, high-quality translates to feeling a sense of predictability, stability, and control over their work schedule. That’s great for the 38% of workers who have it, but most do not.

So, in addition to handling timekeeping, the best manufacturing workforce management solutions make it easier for leaders to coordinate and schedule employees as close to their ideal shifts as possible.

WorkForce Software treats employee flexibility as one of its core pillars. Their app makes it easier for employees to communicate their availability, plan time off and swap shifts with your streamlined approval. If you need to borrow employees from other locations to satisfy surges in demand or unplanned absences, you can easily access their availability and preferences with minimal effort.

And with the artificial intelligence integrated into the WorkForce Software, you can automatically analyze historical data, employee work preferences, and business needs in a cohesive view. This can improve efficiency, reduce conflicts, and boost employee satisfaction.

Insights API: Measuring Output in Real Time

24/7 shift operations, especially when they’re spread across distributed locations, require real-time measurements for organizations to stay nimble and competitive. Once all that high-quality workforce management data is gathered and stored, leaders need the ability to intuitively analyze it. Since work labor data doesn’t exist in a bubble, it needs to seamlessly integrate with existing data infrastructure as well as major ERP and HCM systems.

Insights API, an integral part of the WorkForce Software, allows manufacturers to take their raw workforce management data, widening their perspective across shifts and locations with ease. Companies can use their Insights API dashboard to pinpoint the individuals or groups that are peak performers and develop best practices around their habits. Plus, data can forewarn manufacturers about disruptive trends in the workforce or labor market that can interrupt production.

The WorkForce Software also designed their Insights API offering to break down data silos, helping customers create a holistic view by unifying high-quality workforce management data with data from SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, Oracle HCM, and other systems. Dexian’s highly certified WorkForce Software Integration Engineers have experience with over 300 implementations — we’ve seen it all.

Dexian’s solution combines the power of traditional predictive analytics and AI-driven systems to help manufacturers stay ahead of the curve. The intelligent digital assistant within the platform automatically prioritizes tasks based on urgency into a single queue, allowing HR leaders and managers to focus on resolving issues instead of constantly watching for them.

Employee Experience: Making Retention a Breeze

Workers that are distributed across shifts and time zones can sometimes feel a little removed from the bigger picture. Sure, they might feel close-knit with their shiftmates but can ultimately feel distanced from leaders who aren’t on their schedule or immediate sphere. Over time, unaddressed disengagement can result in morale issues, slowed production, or even increased attrition, none of which manufacturers can risk right now.

Engaged employees, on the other hand? They offer businesses incredible benefits:

WorkForce Experience is an engagement tool that workers can have with them wherever and whenever they work. Their self-service mobile app gives employees a simplified and speedy way to communicate and access information. Employees can send real-time communications to management and give shift and availability updates while management can use it to relay announcements, provide urgent feedback, and even recognize wins.

Plus, WorkForce Experience makes critical information easily accessible 24/7. Rather than relying on word of mouth or (often) unread emails to relay new labor laws, time and attendance practices, or union rules, you can provide a central repository of all the procedures and guidelines workers need to know.

And with WorkForce Experience’s streamlined employee sentiment capture, you can conduct pulse surveys across shifts and locations. This is a great way to discover if there are dysfunctional shift leaders or isolated friction points, drastically reducing the time to take action on that vital feedback.

Getting the Most from Your WorkForce Software

WorkForce isn’t just another HR tool; it’s a strategic asset for manufacturers trying to stay competitive and cost-effective in uncertain times. Labor cost control, regulatory confidence, and workforce satisfaction are all made easier with the smart and fast WorkForce Suite.

Yet the rapid deployment of this cloud-based platform is only part of the journey. Once WorkForce goes live, manufacturers still need to manage user adoption, system optimization, and evolving workforce dynamics. That’s where trusted partners like Dexian come in.

We’ve collaborated with WorkForce since 2016 and became a Global SI Premier Partner in 2022.  We’ve helped hundreds of clients with application management support and have established one of the largest WorkForce Software Centers of Excellence in the world.  Dexian’s experienced onshore and offshore workforce helps to streamline the transition and enable adoption of the WorkForce Suite.

Looking to streamline manufacturing workforce management solutions across shifts, states, and time zones? Reach out and explore how Dexian can help optimize your labor efficiency, compliance, and employee engagement via the WorkForce Software solution.