Using WFM in production

Effective management of production processes requires accurate accounting, planning and organization of all enterprise resources, including personnel. Production plans at enterprises are regularly adjusted and to implement them, it is necessary to be able to quickly and optimally redistribute available resources to implement the changed production program. In this article, we will consider how to organize and automate personnel schedule planning in the WFM TARGControl workforce management system, based on the current production plan of the enterprise.

Let's start in order – first, locations equivalent to the employee's work places must be entered into the system. In the case of production, these can be production lines, conveyors, sections, etc. In this case, the names of these locations are entered into the system, for example, Conveyor 1, Conveyor 2, and so on.

Next, we need workers who will work at our enterprise – we enter them into the system and link them to conveyors (locations) where they can work. You can enter them manually, or by importing or integrating them via API with the accounting systems in effect at the enterprise that contain this information.

Employees in turn have skills that can be linked to a specific conveyor and have a skill rating (priority). Let's say there is an employee Ivanov who can work as an Operator on Conveyor 1 for 5 points, and on Conveyor 2 – for 3, he can also work as a Loader regardless of the place of work for 2 points. Based on the Location, Skill and Rating, the priority is determined when planning where the employee will work. Now let's move on to preparing for planning.

But before you start planning and assigning personnel to shifts, in addition to the production plan, the system must understand that to produce a certain volume and type of product, you need a certain number of resources – people with a certain skill and a place (location) where this product is produced.

Therefore, before the production plan, the following templates must be entered into the system: product name, skills (which people should work), the number of these people, and the locations where these products can be produced. This information is entered into the system once and updated as the range or production technology changes.

After entering all the templates, you can import a production plan from a file into the system, which will contain information about the name of the product we plan to produce, the volume of production, the start time of production, and locations. We can load the plan for any time interval, for example, for a month.

When loading a production plan, open shifts will be generated in the system – these are shifts that are not assigned to specific employees, but show the planned volume of human resources of the enterprise with certain skills necessary to fulfill this production plan.

Next, the shift schedule must be planned by employees. As mentioned above, the schedule must be planned based on the skills of the employees, but there are also time restrictions for employees – that is, how much time the employee has already worked in the reporting period and how much more he can work within a day, week, month or quarter.

To calculate time constraints, you can load planned employee schedules into the system using integration. Planned schedules are schedules that were assigned to an employee when he or she was hired and take into account legislation and other restrictions within the enterprise itself. After loading it, the system calculates how many employees can work during a certain period. If necessary, when distributing employees across open shifts, the system can also prioritize bringing employees to work, with a link to the planned work schedule.

If all of the above is available, the system will automatically assign shifts to employees, while it will not allow employees to work overtime, and will assign the most trained employees to each conveyor and type of work first. But after automatic planning, situations may still occur when we may not have enough employees (deficit) to produce any product. In this case, the Replanning tool will help us. What can we do:

1. Automatically assign a shift to an employee who has expressed a desire to work on a certain day. That is, the employee has set his “Availability”. In this case, he can be assigned a shift, but only if he does not have overtime.

2. Balancing. Let's say we have an employee who is already assigned the maximum number of hours for a period, in this case this tool will help us select an employee and remove his shift from a future period to close a critical (for example, tomorrow) day. The employee is automatically assigned a deficit shift; the shift for the future period will go to open.

3. Request for outsourcing. If we cannot close the shift using the methods above, we can send the shift to outsourcing to attract third-party employees.

That is, the WFM TARGControl tools allow not only to plan shifts, but also to quickly re-plan in case of emergency situations in production (for example, an employee is on sick leave, production plans are adjusted, etc.). For example, if a production plan is updated from today to tomorrow, the responsible employee only needs to load the updated production plan into the system, after which the system will delete shifts that are no longer relevant based on the new plan, while leaving shifts for products that continue to be produced. That is, additional planning of already scheduled shifts may no longer be required.

To sum up, it can be said that automation of labor management processes and shift planning is a key element of successful functioning of modern manufacturing enterprises. These solutions help to ensure optimal use of the main resource of any enterprise – employees. Which ultimately contributes to the growth of labor productivity, reduction of payroll costs and reduction of non-production losses of personnel working time.