Survey: Manufacturers need help with workforce management

While manufacturers understand the importance of a highly skilled workforce, many still have trouble finding workers with the exact skills needed to meet corporate goals.

That's one conclusion that can be drawn from a recent survey commissioned by Workbrain, a supplier of Web-based workforce management solutions.

The survey, which canvassed manufacturers of varying size, indicates that maintaining a workforce with the requisite skills to stay competitive—while dealing with rapid shifts in market demand—is the biggest area of concern.

The key to overcoming these hurdles, according to survey respondents, is having the right tools—or the right folks—to do the job.

A mechanism for tracking employee skills to ensure that the right people are assigned to each task is seen as vital. However, few of the companies surveyed have formal systems for matching employee skills to projects. Some have manual means of tracking employee skills, but most simply expect supervisors to intuitively know which employees are best suited for a job. This is in line with the answer most survey respondents gave when asked which department should be responsible for developing and executing workforce deployment strategies. Most said the operations department should assume that role—outranking human resources, IT, or finance.

The survey also inquired as to whether outsourcing programs are helping manufacturers meet goals. The majority (62 percent) say outsourcing is part of their strategy, with the primary goal of reducing costs to keep a competitive edge.