One of the greatest resources of any job shop is its employees. You wouldn’t be able to finish any jobs without them. So, just like any resource, you want to manage it well. Making sure your employees know what to do is the easy part. Employee performance management is the hard part. You may have a gut feeling about which employees are hard workers and which ones are not. If you can put data behind that, you can be sure you’re giving the right employees the help they need and giving the right employees more responsibility. ERP software can help.
Quality Control
One big way to check employee performance is to see how many parts they make are up to spec. With an ERP system, it’s easy for your employees to know what that means and track how many parts are good or not. Once they’ve tracked the parts, it’s easy for you to pull a report on which employees are making the best parts and which are not. You may need to retrain the employees who consistently have problems meeting quality control in using a particular machine or procedure.
Job Routing
Similarly, with ERP software, you can see how long it takes each employee to complete a step of a job. Asking employees to write this down can easily lead to inaccurate times, but using an ERP system to clock in and out of jobs makes it easy to get accurate times. Time spent on a job is just a piece of the puzzle. Someone who is fast on a step could be turning out pieces that don’t meet quality control. On the other hand, someone who’s consistently meeting quality control targets may be taking too long on each step. Tracking how long each person takes can help you understand which employees need what kind of guidance.
Individual Review
Doing an individual review with your folks on the floor is a great way to make sure they’re on track for the career they want and for the job performance you want. Reviews are complicated no matter which side of them you’re on, but data can make them easier. If you know an employee is making good pieces in the time estimated on the router, you know that part of their work is good. If they’re not, you can talk to them about that and, hopefully, see a positive change. In our blog posts about Millennials or Gen Z, we mention that they appreciate feedback, but reviews can still be helpful even for your employees of a different generation. With data captured in an ERP system, your reviews can focus on data rather than how people feel they’re doing.
As the Silver Tsunami looms and the skills gap seems to get wider, it’s important to work with the employees you have. An excellent way to get them to stay is to show appreciation when they do good work and help them when things start to slip. It’s hard to track that for everyone without a system, so why not use one that helps you throughout the shop? ERP software makes it easy to keep your employees and help them become better.
Interested in developing your employees?
