While industries are finding ways to work around the pandemic disruptions through remote working, not everyone can work from home. Manufacturing is still grappling with the challenge of managing the workforce and working on strategies to keep their businesses running.
A virtual roundtable conference was organised to exchange ideas on strategies adopted by business leaders to ensure business continuity through workforce management.
The virtual roundtable conference supported by Manufacturing Today was presented by Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG), world leaders in the space of workforce management solutions.
The topic for the day was “Ensuring business continuity through workforce management strategies.”
After a brief introduction to the event ITP Media India organiser, Editor Syed Ameen began by reaffirming the relevancy of the topic. Commenting on how organisations were handling their manpower during the pandemic challenge with the use of technology, he threw open the symposium for the thinkers gathered virtually for the round table conference.
The Agenda
Industry leaders from across sectors gathered virtually and set out to discuss de-risking the workforce, dwell on major trends in the industry and weigh in on the pros and cons of various solutions on display.
Importantly, the panellists were concerned about the non-availability of the right skilled people that threatens to cause significant disruptions to businesses and business plans. They set on the agenda the measures that can be undertaken to address the challenge.
The emergent trend of using a contingent workforce, the visible need for getting the workforce ready with agility in adopting change and the safety and wellbeing of the workforce were the other agendas on the table.
Strategies for bettering workforce productivity and leveraging it as a competitive advantage was a subject that intrigued the thinkers and they set out to discuss it threadbare.
The attendees were also eager to examine how technologies could be harnessed for de-risking the workforce, improving productivity and gaining a competitive advantage.
The Panellists
- Vanaja Kodungallur, Director- Industry Solutions and Marketing, UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group)
- Shailesh Sharma, Director, Manufacturing, SKF India
- Rakesh Rampratap Tripathi, VP – Air Conditioning (CAC) Business, Voltas Ltd
- Prasad Kale, Plant Head, Marico
- Ashok Jena, Plant Head, IPCA Laboratories Ltd
- Satendra Tiwari, Plant Head, CNH Industrial
- Sandra Andrews, Sr. Director- Human Resources, Flextronics
- Shailendra Vispute, Manufacturing Head, Bayer CropScience Ltd
- Sanjay Singh, Plant HR Head, Alkem Laboratories Ltd
- Jitendra Raghav, GM Manufacturing, Aequs
- Anil Singh, Director – Operations & Supply Chain, Sika India
- Moderator: Anand S, Vice President, TechVision and Head-Global Innovation Centre, Frost & Sullivan
The Editor, before handing over to the moderator, called upon Vanaja Kodungallur, the Director at UKG to set the context of why her company decided upon organising the event and to let the audience into the space they were in.
“With 40 years in the people technology space, we offer end to end solutions right from tracking people’s time to managing compliance and productivity. While most solutions in the people technology area look into managing the employee lifecycle, our solutions focus on the day-in-the-life experience and the operational management of the entire workforce whether they are office workers, blue-collared category or even contract workforce.” “Optimisation of people on a daily basis is what we are into,” she added.
The moderator of the event began with a presentation on “Workforce Management.” He took the attendees through an insightful journey on key trends and observations in the manufacturing sector, workforce dynamics in the manufacturing sector that included among other topics, managing risks to ensure business continuity.
De-risking workforce, creating competitive advantage
“The pandemic has underscored the fact that a lot of processes can be swiftly handled virtually,” said the global innovation head at Frost and Sullivan.
“At the one end of the spectrum are the business variables like downtime, production plan and so on which have become more difficult to plan to make businesses turn to technologies to meet them. At the other end is workforce management; that is deploying the right type of people in terms of skill availability.”
The nature of the workforce is changing in the manufacturing industry. Asked to elaborate on this emerging trend, SKF Director Sharma noted the salvage from the debris following the pandemic. “The kind of agility, the kind of accountability and ownership to the company that was demonstrated by our workforce, including the blue-collar workers was commendable,” he said. He also noted the increasing use of technology to find solutions to workforce management. “Be it for monitoring of the workforce or measuring workforce productivity or ensuring the wellbeing and safety of the workforce, we are seeing increasing use of technology,” he added.
Among the challenges of grave concern to the panellists was the non-availability of a rightly skilled workforce that is causing a lot of disruption in the industry. Anand pivoted to Tripathi for the short-term and long-term measures to address the challenge.
“Trust your people,” was the cryptic reply from Tripathi. “Whatever metrics you employ; be it increasing productivity, increasing market share or increasing the top-line; trusting your people is the first lesson that the pandemic has taught us.”
Elaborating on the point regarding placing trust in people to overcome the deficit in the availability of a skilled workforce, Tripathi said, “With trust, the employees feel a sense of ownership and by providing necessary tools and guidance and creating an ecosystem of learning, the workers will be able to deliver.”
Multiskilling of the workforce was Kale’s answer to the non-availability of skilled employees. “We can’t depend on the kind of skills that are available solely with an individual,” he said.
Multi-skilling of the workforce helps organisations to take care of any contingencies that may arrive. “Employment of contract workers and increased focus on automation are the other trends seen in the manufacturing,” added Kale coming from the FMCG industry.
Not very different is the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. “Continuity of business in such kind of pandemic is not an issue,” said IPCA Plant Head Jena emphatically, elaborating on a number of initiatives taken by his company and the industry for the well-being of the workers who in turn helped the businesses with their continuity. He talked about the various compliances that the pharma industry has to adhere to including labour laws and insisted that “if we take care of the workers’ health and safety, they will help us with our business continuity.”
Also from the pharma industry, Sanjay Singh from Alkem, emphasised that “the nature of the industry is that of an essential service and it had to stand up to serve the community, to serve the society during the pandemic.”
Satendra Tiwari from CNH dwelt on the need for agility in the workforce and touched upon IoT that has helped businesses make faster decisions in the post-covid scenario. “If you are in business you have to be agile,” he remarked succinctly. “We are exporting to 62 different countries and thanks to the IoT practices that we have adopted in the industry, we were able to make the right decisions at the right time,” he added explaining how agility has helped them in their pursuit of continuity of business. “Even during the pandemic when the entire country was shut down, we were able to serve fifty different countries.”
Continuing with the exchange of thought leadership that all the panellists had, Sandra Andrews from Flextronics was drawn into the discussion by Anand.
“Let there be the first wave, or the second or the third wave, we have a structure in place, a very disciplined structure; and our business continues as usual,” said the Senior Director, Human Resources, Flextronics.
With the Human Resource functions behind her, employee welfare and safety aspects were the first things that she addressed in the organisation. The manual that they prepared turned out to be a good strategy for addressing employee safety and well-being and inculcating rigid discipline. “In the district of Kanchipuram, we were the first company to be allowed operations of the business because of the strategy of safety and awareness that we had put in place.”
Vispute on the other hand contemplated digital initiatives around the workforce that have significantly increased in the last twenty months. He covered the main aspects of managing the workforce in reference to digitisation and digitalisation. His were the words of caution in relying exclusively on digitalisation and stressed the need for human involvement and attention.
Being in the manufacturing of the agricultural product, his workers have to deal with hazardous and toxic chemicals in some of the operations where they need to be absolutely attentive.
“Most of the accidents and incidents across the globe have occurred due to excessive dependence on technology,” cautioned Vispute, the Manufacturing Head at Bayer CropScience while welcoming digitalisation.
Creating an atmosphere that encourages new ideas among the workforce, collecting data and using data analytics, developing systems and procedures, using data in a structured manner, inclusion and diversity were the other topics he touched upon.
Bringing in the supply-chain perspective to the conference was Anil Singh, Director-Operations and Supply Chain at Sika.
“Hearing the words of Warren Buffet and other global leaders, I would like to summarise that the future CEO of companies should be from the supply chain,” he said. “Operations and Supply Chain in 2020 after the pandemic have taken the command over the supply of materials,” he added to underscore the important role ahead for the supply chain.
He talked about creating flexibility in the system that saw his delivery time getting shortened from three weeks to less than one week and creating a manual of standards to be adopted in case of any future disruption.
With his inputs in the discussion, Raghav steered the focus of discussions from the more top-management side to the actions at the shop floor.
“Detailing the shop-floor layout and organising a hand-book of etiquette for the workmen for social-distancing are the initiatives that really worked for us,” added the GM Manufacturing at Aequs, bringing the perspective from the people-intensive infrastructure space.
Through the entire gamut of opinions, the role of technology was stressed in the de-risking workforce and addressing the availability deficit. Vanaja Kodungallur presented how they are leveraging technology at UKG to deal with the issue. In the space of managing people on an operational day-to-day basis, for 40,000 customers with 40 million employees spread over 100 countries, UKG post-pandemic, are helping customers leverage technology for business continuity.
Kodungallur explained, “We focus on helping customers with the availability of people by giving a comprehensive, real-time view of availability for the unified workforce, taking into consideration all the constraints like production volumes, availability and quarantine status, skill fitment.” Based on the information, they help plan the shop floor.
“The solution optimises for business requirements and individual preferences as well as to ensure that compliance rules including local labour laws are considered to generate the best fit schedules,” said Kodungallur.
Over two hours of scintillating conversation between industry thought leaders coming from a wide spectrum of sectors was well attended.
Take-aways
Among the key takeaways of the conference was that the leadership teams now view the pandemic disruption differently than they had when it first hit the businesses. In hindsight, they feel the continuity of business is not an issue, the pandemic is not a threat but an opportunity.
The absence of physical presence across offices and shop floors is manageable felt by the attendees.
Digital practices adopted by businesses before the pandemic had helped companies through the challenge. The news of their successes trickling out has created an urge among businesses to rapidly adopt digitisation and digitalisation. Technologies, it turned out, served as a blessing.
Creating standards, even the simple ones like preparing handbooks or manuals talking about workforce conduct during the pandemic, have played an essential role in ensuring business continuity.
Most significantly, businesses have understood the value of trusting their employees and unifying them towards a common larger goal. Empowering the right people with the right tools of learning is now viewed as an important step towards meeting the challenge of the shortage of availability of a rightly skilled workforce.
The panellists were unanimous in their appreciation of government support to the industries in meeting the challenges placed by the pandemic disruption.
The Editor, Syed Ameen, thanked all the panellists for their insightful participation and the moderator for conducting the symposium so seamlessly. He was also profuse in his appreciation to Vanaja Kodungallur, Director- Industry Solutions and Marketing, UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group) for organising the event.