You’ve told us that finding and keeping a skilled workforce is one of your top challenges. And we know the gap is only going to increase with 25 percent of U.S. manufacturing employees are 55 years old or older and Baby Boomers are retiring at a rate of 10,000 people per day.^[1] If that wasn’t challenging enough, you also might be missing out on additional revenue streams because you can’t hire employees fast enough to keep pace with increasing demands.

Focusing on operational improvements like reducing waste, automating processes, and driving more efficiency only goes so far to solve this problem. But many of our customers are doing something different: leveraging existing employees by moving them to higher value roles. Here are three ways they are accomplishing this:

1. Unlock People Potential with the Cloud
You may not be aware that many of your best employees spend a lot of their time on mundane tasks like manual cycle counting, inventory management, software/server maintenance, or running business and production reports. These are business-critical activities that need to be taken care of but many manufacturers have found a more effective and efficient way to manage them. The right Software-as-a Service (SaaS) cloud solution automates these activities, and essentially eliminates the need to allocate people to get them done—what’s even more appealing is you’ll do away with human errors and get more accurate information.

2. Enable Engagement with Access to Critical Data
To really tackle the issue of worker shortage, you need to do more than reallocate people to new jobs. Giving more of your employees better access to critical business data means they’ll be able to be more efficient and more collaborative. With more accurate data, they can develop better work processes for less one-off manual processes outside the system that could introduce errors.

3. Keep Younger Talent by Going Digital
Using SaaS-based cloud solutions can create new opportunities for existing employees to also prevent employee churn—especially with younger workers. They have grown up as digital natives. The applications they use are largely run in the cloud, and they think mobility first. The new generation of manufacturing employee is not going to be tethered to a workstation or accept green screens and archaic user experiences. And if your competition has more modern systems, that’s where they’ll go.

Get more insight, download the white paper: 3 Ways to Solve the Manufacturing Headcount Shortage and Meet Customer Demand.

^[1] https://www.industryweek.com/leadership/perfect-storm-manufacturing-workforce