The Best Way to Find New Talent for Your Manufacturing Operation in 2021

The Secret to Maximizing Hiring in This

Competitive Market 

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the end of 2020, unemployment across the Midwest fell below 7 percent. In the heart of the Midwest, many states with a robust manufacturing sector saw unemployment fall well below 5 percent. When considering highly sought-after specific manufacturing trades and back-office responsibilities, you can take those numbers even lower. While it is exciting to see these substantial numbers, it means an increasingly competitive market for skilled laborers. How do you compete for talent?

The Lake Companies has nearly four decades of industry experience partnering with manufacturing companies to streamline their entire operation. We understand how much time human resource leaders are spending trying to recruit suitable candidates in this small pool of job seekers. Most companies spend countless hours on the constant cycle of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training, only to find some of the most suitable candidates never show up or leave with no notice.

What is the secret to better hiring? Don’t look outside the organization for talent. More importantly, look inside. Those people you employ are the ones who got your company to where it is today. Those same people can propel your company to greater heights without investing another dime in additional staff. The secret is to generate “white space”.

Finding the White Space in Your Organization    

By streamlining your workflow, your entire facility can find significant value in internal resources without investing another dime into recruiting, hiring, or training. We have worked with hundreds of manufacturers across the globe to implement our ERP software solutions, including Shop-Trak™ and Doc-Trak™. Here is how these specialized software tools can create white space throughout your manufacturing company and maximize the efficiency of the team you already have in place:

• By utilizing Shop-Trak™, you can grease the skids and streamline your shop floor workforce administration and execution tasks. This tool allows you to accelerate production, see real-time production information for any machine, and automate while simplifying your labor collection across the organization. By adding Shop-Trak™ to your toolbelt, you’re able to eliminate countless hours spent by various departments tracking down data, schedules, work sequences, material issues, payroll, and more. Shop-Trak is a perpetual white space generator, by eliminating countless non-value-added tasks, you will quickly fill with revenue-generating production.
   
• Through Doc-Trak™ you streamline your office and manufacturing operation through a superior document management experience. Doc-Trak™ enables your company to go paperless, which means drastically reducing the printing, preparation, and distribution of paper-based drawings, work instructions, quality requirements, and more by providing information specific to the function of the worker, without the noise of excess documentation. This gives everyone from the shop floor to engineering access to real-time information, without searching, generating whitespace throughout the organization.

In addition, both of these programs are specifically designed to be used in conjunction with everything Infor CloudSuite Industrial (CSI/ SyteLine) ERP offers.

The bottom line is that the skilled labor hiring market will only continue to get more competitive in the coming years — we all know that. However, manufacturers that have poised their organization for long-term success by streamlining their processes and creating company-wide synergies will be at a serious advantage over those who have not.  As the rest of the world continues the endless talent competition cycle, we are here to help you leverage the team you’ve already built. For years we’ve helped clients in their organization, which has in-turn helped them find a long-term, smart solution that results in fiscal advantage.

The Lake Companies is Here to Help You & Your Whole Team

Our greatest reward is when our customers are successful as a direct result of implementing our secret strategies and technology solutions. Over the years, we have successfully helped hundreds of manufacturing companies worldwide improve efficiency, lower costs, improve production, eliminate repetitive and tedious tasks, lower their environmental footprints, and make their organization a better place for employees to work. We are here to help your company too. Interested in discussing what that could look like? Contact our team here. We will show you another secret to making the process permanent with perpetual improvement and give it a name you can call your own.