Unplanned downtime costs industrial manufacturers as much as 50 billion dollars every year. - Forbes

An average manufacturer confronts about 800 hours of unplanned downtime a year, according to a post from Forbes. This translates to about 15 hours of downtime every single week—a major cost that is also completely avoidable. Manufacturers need to move away from the “We’ll fix it when it breaks” line of thought when it comes to their plants and move toward a TPM or Total Productive Maintenance-based philosophy.

TPM has been around for a while, so it should already have been implemented in most manufacturing operations, right? Well, not quite, according to the below graphic from aMcKinsey survey.

The Role of a Frontline-Workforce Platform in Attracting and Retaining Workers

A recent post from Accenture points out that there were 10.1 million job openings in America as of August 2022 and that attracting frontline workers remained a major challenge for businesses.

It seems almost paradoxical that most workers are looking for extra work to cover inflation while most organizations claim to have workforce shortages and are making active efforts to engage new people while trying their best to retain existing workers. The data presented shows that these organizations aren’t doing enough to attract and retain talent. Accenture highlights how this situation can be improved and how, by making certain changes, even smaller companies can develop thriving, capable, and technologically forward-looking workforces that deliver the best possible KPI results.

In the last post in this series, we looked at how retaining frontline workers and attracting new talent in DC and warehouse businesses can be related to the quality and efficacy of the IT applications that an operation deploys. Furthermore, we explored how a Frontline Workforce platform like Webalo uses orchestration and time management to help distribution centers make larger profits.