Working Through Attrition on the Plant Floor with Workforce Enablement

Global competition has tightened for a skilled workforce with the training to be highly effective on the plant floor. According to the bureau of labor statistics in the United States, the workforce turnover rate for manufacturing has risen steadily over the past five years. And a study by McKinsey found that 66% of surveyed executives believe skill gaps are a top 10 issue for their companies.

So, what can your business do to combat these trends and recruit and retain top talent on the plant floor? AVEVA has some ideas for how you can identify your challenges and find solutions to the problem of workforce attrition. 


AVEVA Operations Control enables workforces to reduce attrition on the plant floor


Why Workers Leave

Workers have many individual reasons for separating from a company. In general, most workers leave for a better combination of pay, benefits, or flexibility. However, in industries where pay and benefits are relatively standardized, companies may find that small nuances in how they do business can make a difference in whether an employee seeks to stay with them long-term or move on to another opportunity. In manufacturing, operators and employees may have industry-specific reasons for looking elsewhere, such as unintuitive or difficult to use machine UIs, cumbersome analog paperwork, or poorly managed alarms and notifications that makes their job onerous. 

There is also a generational shift in manufacturing to consider. Most current industrial workers in the United States are over 35 years old according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with many nearing retirement ages. However, the plant floor hasn’t kept pace with the rate of consumer technologies. As a result, companies whose operations don’t reflect the capabilities of innovations like smart equipment and centralized data visualization may find it harder to retain a younger digital-native workforce. 

Enabling Your Workforce for New Challenges

One way to keep your teams enthusiastic and optimistic about facing new challenges is ensuring they’re equipped to handle them. This means giving your teams access to world-class operations software capable of helping them make decisions that matter in real time and act confidently in urgent situations. 

One way to ensure your workforce always has access to the best tools and most advanced capabilities is to consider solutions like AVEVA Operations Control, which ensures that operations control software is always on the most recent version to make their jobs easier with quality-of-life improvements and offers unlimited access to collaborative information. 

It’s also important to use intuitive software that can help you thoughtfully design alarms and notifications so that operators’ attention is not constantly drawn to information that isn’t immediately useful or actionable. To enable workers to take proactive steps to correct issues before they start, it’s important to take advantage of tools like predictive maintenance that will allow operators to identify negative trends and have clear solutions available at their fingertips. 

Keeping Your Workforce Engaged

Enablement is more than just a buzzword for workers. Being able to make decisions that matter and affect business outcomes directly can mean a lot to employees, especially when they are compensated for taking a proactive approach to operations. 

AVEVA built its operations control portfolio with engaged workforces in mind. One unique feature of AVEVA Operations Control solutions is the ability to choose from several different complementary HMI/SCADA options and choose the mix of architectures that best helps achieve business goals. 

With effective operations solutions, enabled teams can leverage centralized data on the cloud, or AI and Machine Learning to make rapid decisions based on a shared source of information spanning the whole enterprise. When they are able to take these meaningful actions, they’re more likely to play an active role in the overall optimization of the entire business. 


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