Brain Drain
Post by Mike Gugger
Who am I to tell you anything about your manufacturing operations? Who am I to tell you what you should be looking for? I am a consultant. As Peter Drucker aptly stated, “My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” It is the response to those questions that has given me insights to what issues you are facing in your operations.
Over the next five posts, I will be discussing my top five things to be cognizant of today (or in the not too distant future) on your shop floor.
Brain Drain
Not new, you say? Well, sorry to inform you, but it is just going to get worse.
I don’t need to tell anyone that Chinese manufacturing is booming. When you walk into a Chinese plant, it is brightly lit and spotless. The workers are standing in front of very modern equipment. They are all wearing blue smocks and white ball caps.
When you walk into an American plant, it is equally well lit. It is clean – but does not gleam like the Chinese plant – the workers are dressed significantly more casually in t-shirts, jeans, maybe some ball caps, of the home team. The equipment is not as new and the workers are not as young.
So what’s the big deal? When you ask the Chinese worker what their machine is doing they don’t really know, when you ask them what their job is they tell you, “when the light comes on, I push this button and change out the part.”
When you ask the American worker what their job is, his response is much more in-depth about the workings of the machine, the development of the process, the maintenance of the quality of the part and what the indications are of when that quality is slipping. What’s my point? The American worker is much more deeply involved with their job. They are an integral part of the operations; their value to your organization is hundred-fold to that of the Chinese worker.
It is this manufacturing job that has created a middle-class in this country and drives the consumer economy. These people are getting older and there is no one coming up behind them to fill the gaps.
Don’t believe me? Go and count the grey heads (and bald heads) as opposed to the full heads of hair out there on the shop floor. Retirement, job loss in the sector and the few new going into the trade – all add up to loss of process knowledge in your company.
Where is “Old Joe”? The guy that had been in your shop since day one…he’s going or is gone. Did you capture his tribal knowledge before he left? Is there another “Old Joe” to fill in? Heck – is there even a young Joe?
In the end this is a resource issue. Personnel – no, skilled personnel – are in very short supply and this resource must be managed well for your operations to move forward without disruption.
In my next post, I’ll be listing the second of the top five – optimization.
