Impact Dakota Blog is a blog dedicated to supporting North Dakota’s manufacturing community improve People, Purpose, Processes and Performance. Entries provide information on opportunities, new ideas, quick tips, celebrations of success, and well, frankly, anything to help you become a better manufacturer.
What’s gotten lost in the unrelenting focus on the customer experience has been optimizing your worker experiences. In fact, it’s almost paradoxical to expect your workers to give great customer experiences, but not expect them to have great experiences themselves! Unfortunately, while many companies have meticulously planned out their customer journeys — from marketing to ecommerce to communication — very few have done the same for their employees. Perhaps that’s why the national “quits” rate continues to hover near 3%, well above the long-term average of 1.99%. In a time of workforce shortages and talent mismatches, it’s never been more important to create a new discipline: worker experience. Learn more about why it’s important for manufacturers to focus on employee experience.
For years, U.S. manufacturers have struggled to find and keep good workers. The pandemic brought this to crisis level, and the difficult labor market has led companies to find creative workforce solutions. Manufacturing Day, held every year on the first Friday of October, is a great opportunity for manufacturers to open their doors and show students, parents and educators the careers they have to offer. MFG Day 2022, on Oct. 7, 2022 (with events held throughout October), will draw public attention to manufacturing’s present-day reality and encourage careers in this secure and growing sector of the economy. By participating in this national outreach effort, manufacturers will find resources to address the skilled labor shortage, take charge of the public image of manufacturing, and help ensure a prosperous future for manufacturing throughout the U.S.
The Center for Innovative Food Technology (CIFT) and JobsOhio recently commissioned a business intelligence group, TEConomy Partners, to conduct a study on the current and future state of the food industry. The findings identified five large-scale trends, or themes, that are having a significant impact on the industry, whether you are in craft beer or dairy. The disruptive technologies span the entire value chain and will have impacts for many years. It’s not just high-demand areas such as supply chain and cold storage where innovation is occurring, it’s also happening in traditional unit operations found in legacy manufacturers and product categories. Learn more about the five long-term, impactful trends in the food industry.
Our world has changed dramatically over the past two-and-a-half years. And so have the needs, desires and expectations of the people you hope to hire and retain. To help organizations of all kinds improve their ability to recruit and retain great workers, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and the U.S. Department of Commerce, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor and around 60 industry representatives, developed the Job Quality Toolkit.
The toolkit is derived from the globally emulated Baldrige Excellence Framework and incorporates insights from numerous job quality experts. The toolkit describes eight key drivers that influence how workers perceive the quality of their jobs, which of course impacts their satisfaction with and commitment to those jobs. It also offers suggestions for strategies and actions and provides resources that can help you move the needle on those drivers and improve the quality of the jobs you offer, and ultimately increase worker retention, productivity and the success of your business.
In the past, enterprise systems in manufacturing facilities had distinct boundaries. The shop floor was separated from the office functions of the company both physically and electronically. Few production systems were connected to each other or the internet. In some ways, this approach, commonly known as “air gapping,” gave reasonable protection for small manufacturers. Without the risks associated with connectivity, manufacturers were seen by attackers as hard targets and not worth the effort.
Today, with the growing use of the internet and mobile devices, boundaries between traditional information technology (IT) systems, production systems, operational technologies (OT), or other equipment have almost disappeared. With the recent increase in the number of employees working remotely, the boundaries that remained in place were weakened further. Meanwhile, attacks to get around the air gap have become well known. Manufacturing is now the most targeted industry for cybersecurity attacks. This is one of the reasons cybersecurity has become a critical component of Industry 4.0 implementation.
Many manufacturers who adopted lean principles by applying a “just-in-time” (JIT) mindset to inventory of materials and parts have been burned, sometimes badly, by cascading supply chain disruptions. Broken links in the supply chain have created havoc, especially for smaller manufacturers. Some have scrambled to build “safety stock” of hard-to-find supplies. Others have sought out redundant sourcing. The reality is that everything is connected in your supply chain, and those connections can be fragile when they are not well supported. No, lean supply chain is not dead. It’s quite the opposite. When your supply chain breaks down, lean systems for the rest of your value stream system will help you deal with the issue. Solutions revolve around agility and controls, not masking inefficiencies.
Through a recent seminar at The City Club of Cleveland, MAGNET’s Matt Fieldman learned that there are eight simple reasons why you’re struggling with your workforce. These “social determinants of work” are plaguing most cities and towns and must be addressed. When we’re talking about millions of Americans still on the sidelines of our economy, this isn’t about individuals – this is about our systems. These factors are all outside of your employee’s control but because they have significant individual consequences, they are affecting your company and our American manufacturing industry.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light a stark reality about current supply chains. In their recent MEP National Network™/Modern Machine Shop webinar “How Smaller Manufacturers Can Develop Risk Management Strategies for Their Supply Chains,” Gary Steinberg of California Manufacturing Technology Consulting (CMTC, the California MEP Center) and Chris Scafario from the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center (DVIRC, part of the Pennsylvania MEP) shared strategies for identifying and mitigating supply chain risks, especially aimed at small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs).
The manufacturing community has long struggled with finding skilled workers, citing, among other things, the misperceptions that manufacturing jobs underpay, are monotonous and involve working in dirty factories. With the adoption of Industry 4.0 — automation and robotics — the task at hand for the industry is as much about raising awareness and creating interest for high-tech careers in advanced manufacturing as it is about changing perceptions. That’s why manufacturers should be getting more involved with their local schools. According to Bill Padnos, workforce development manager with the National Tool and Machining Association, 64 percent of high school students choose their careers based on their interests and experiences. Engaging with students via factory tours, educational programming and interactive contests helps raise awareness in ways that will help to fill the future talent stream. Plus, the more your region knows about manufacturing, the easier it is to get people interested in manufacturing careers.
A new infographic, Reshoring and the Pandemic: Bringing Manufacturing Back to America, delves into various factors related to reshoring supply chains and shines a light on how the MEP National Network™ supports these efforts. Even before the pandemic, some manufacturers were thinking seriously about bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., as a million jobs were reshored in the past decade. Product quality, freight costs and supply chain risks were all considerations before the pandemic. Proximity to customers and markets, government incentives and availability of skilled workers also all played a role in manufacturers’ decisions to move back to the U.S. The infographic will help you learn about various considerations behind this trend. You’ll see the top countries manufacturing is returning from and the top industries coming back to the U.S.