Employee Productivity Tracking in the Automotive Industry: A Worker Management Solution for Polish Auto Companies
The automotive industry is the second largest industry in Poland that is responsible for about 8 percent of the country’s GDP and more than 13 percent of its exports. The industry is also a major employer in the country. According to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), around 203 000 people are currently employed in auto manufacturing in Poland.
The growth of the industry, among a number of critical factors, depends on the availability of qualified labor, which is becoming a major issue. A 2019 report called “Automotive Executive Barometer” prepared by Polski Związek Przemysłu Motoryzacyjnego (Polish Association of the Automotive Industry) outlined these issues after surveying executives and decision-makers of domestic automotive companies.
Fifty percent of the surveyed business decision-makers are concerned with recruiting skilled staff for their companies in Poland; moreover, 44 percent think that increasing labor costs are something to be concerned about.
Faced with these challenges, business leaders often seek ways to improve existing processes. One way to achieve this goal is to track the people involved in them and identify optimization and standardization opportunities.
Better, More Optimized Manufacturing Processes with Employee Tracking: A Way to Improve Productivity?
One way to improve the productivity for automotive companies is to analyze the existing processes and find out the scope of improvement. Of course, that’s easier said than done, but with the technology of Industry 4.0, this task becomes real and can help automotive manufacturers achieve tangible results.
For example, here are some of the most important technologies and tools of Industry 4.0 that are currently being adopted by auto production companies in Poland:
- Automation and robotization. Currently, there are 165 robots per 10.000 employees in the industry, and the number is growing
- New Enterprise Resource Planning applications (ERP). The ERP software compatible with Industry 4.0 solutions — cloud-based included — is becoming another trend, with 26 percent of Polish non-financial companies using the solution in 2017.
As the below graph shows, the use of ERP has been growing since the beginning of the decade, so it’s reasonable to assume that the trend will continue.
Another technology that has the potential to help automotive businesses cope with rising labor costs and inefficiencies in production is real-time asset tracking.
For example, one way in which the companies in the industry can apply the technology is to track employee with a real-time location system (RTLS). The main purpose of these systems is to help the management of a manufacturing facility to track, analyze, and detect employees in vast industrial spaces.
Applications of RTLS in manufacturing and warehousing (which are the two areas where automotive companies can benefit the most) include:
- Monitoring the activity of employees during shifts
- Quick employee allocation and assignment to new and urgent tasks
- Locating items such as toolboxes for employees requiring them to complete their tasks
- Managing and reducing inventory through informing
- Improving the use of transportation assets such as forklifts
- Tracking other mobile manufacturing assets on a factory floor.
Let’s illustrate how a manufacturing business using RTLS can maximize the productivity of its workforce with a simple example.
Time, which itself costs nothing, is the most expensive “material” for manufacturers. If managed improperly, it may lead to customer penalties, lost contracts, and poor productivity. On the other hand, if a company finds a way to manage the available worker time as effectively as possible, it can achieve higher output with the same input.
In turn, by tracking and analyzing how employees move and work during shifts, production managers can understand how to manage their time in a way that maximizes their productivity. Ultimately, they can develop appropriate work standardization procedures and eliminate wasted employee movement.
So, let’s summarize the formula for maximizing employee productivity with RTLS:
- Track and understand employee movement during shifts
- Develop solutions for optimizing their routines
- Standardize employee work to maximize productivity
- Track the shift productivity and employee activity levels to make sure that work performance is unaffected.
For manufacturing businesses, developing work standardization procedures requires the determination of the optimal time and effort to perform a task under typical conditions. In other words, the standardization means defining new labor standards with time tracking delivered by RTLS.
This is possible through the analysis of the relationship between the diverse factors affecting a manufacturing process and employee working habits and methods.
As our experience working with Polish production companies shows, employee tracking with RTLS in manufacturing facilities provides the data required to:
- Assess the current level of employee work organization and productivity
- Identify optimization possibilities and conditions in a specific process, or for a specific team/employee
- Monitor the changes in employee productivity after applying optimization decisions
- Reduce the need to hire more workers for manufacturing processes.
The introduction of new labor standards based on the actual activity and habits of the workforce during shifts may thus help to uncover inefficiencies and wasted movement/time and understand how a manufacturing process can be improved.
Employee Tracking with RTLS: Is It Time to Adopt?
The growth of the automotive industry in Poland depends on the availability of qualified labor, but adopting Industry 4.0 solutions like real-time employee tracking systems can help reduce the impact of the issue.
Our own employee tracking system, Indoorway RTLS, is a good example of how monitoring employee activity during shifts can help production managers discover and eliminate wasted movement and increase overall productivity.
If you’d like to know how you can start tracking your production shifts and improving the output of your manufacturing company, feel free to contact our experts or visit our site, indoorway.com. We are a Warsaw-based Industry 4.0 company that can consult you on your employee tracking and asset utilization optimization needs.
