Workforce planning in manufacturing: 5 insights from the field
You have a schedule. But do you have a plan?
An ageing workforce, a shrinking pool of technically skilled talent, and constantly shifting production volumes are putting workforce planning in manufacturing under serious pressure. Cyclical shift schedules provide structure, but fall short during seasonal peaks and unexpected demand changes. Younger generations of employees increasingly expect a say in when and how they work. So how do you, as a manufacturing company, stay ahead of all these challenges?
ORTEC, a specialist in workforce planning software for manufacturing, hosted a roundtable discussion with experts and business stakeholders. More than 400 organisations and hundreds of thousands of employees rely on ORTEC solutions every day. These are the five key insights.
An article by Prof. Goos Kant, professor Logistic Optimization at Tilburg University & ORTEC Principal Thought Leader Optimization & AI
1. Seasonal peaks and daily fluctuations: keeping control of your workforce capacity
Workforce capacity in manufacturing is heavily influenced by seasonal patterns, public holidays, and demand peaks around events. Sound capacity planning starts with anticipating those fluctuations, not reacting to them.
The most effective approach combines multiple layers of flexibility: permanent employees on annualised hours contracts (flex-time banking), a flexible buffer of agency and temporary workers, and simplified work processes that allow new workers to get up to speed quickly. Companies invest considerable effort in carefully designing cyclical shift schedules, so that weekly and seasonal fluctuations are better absorbed. This allows extra capacity to be deployed during busier periods, and employees to temporarily work more hours during peak seasons. Multilingual instruction apps can help make temporary staff productive faster.
Other proven solutions include building up stock during quieter periods, reprioritising workloads, and exchanging employees between sites with different peak patterns. Companies that invest in this systematically rely less on last-minute adjustments and get more out of their permanent workforce.
ORTEC automatically translates seasonal forecasts into the required staffing levels per day and department, using the Demand Calculation module.
2. Scaling up fast when demand shifts unexpectedly
Sudden volume changes driven by customer orders are the norm rather than the exception in manufacturing. A customer order that moves, a production plan that needs adjusting: it requires planners to scale up or down quickly. The more accurate the forecast, the less ad-hoc intervention is needed, but workforce flexibility always remains essential.
The key lies in simplification. How do you standardise tasks so that employees can rotate between departments more easily? And how do you make external workers deployable faster? Companies that focus on this deliberately shorten onboarding time and increase their ability to respond to peaks.
When an unexpected surge hits, it is also worth considering which work can be temporarily postponed. The most common solutions are deploying permanent staff on additional hours, or offering extra shifts through shift bidding: a system where part-time employees can voluntarily pick up additional shifts.
ORTEC supports planners with optimizers that check the feasibility of schedule changes in real time, without requiring everything to be locked in again from scratch.
3. Skills management in manufacturing: broader deployability as the key
There is a clear trend in manufacturing towards broader deployability: employees who can work across multiple parts of the production process, often called production generalists. Effective skills management starts with systematically mapping which competencies exist within the organisation and which ones are scarce.
Rotating employees between departments is not just a planning tool... it is also a learning mechanism. Employees learn from each other, gain a better understanding of the overall process, and become more valuable to the organisation as a result. At the same time, it requires extra attention to team cohesion, as team compositions change more frequently.
One important point: link KPIs to collective results, not to individual workstations. This encourages collaboration across departments. Employees with scarce skills should be deployed deliberately. Smart skills management prevents expensive competencies from being used inefficiently. Training and maintaining multiple skills can be costly or complex, which is why it is important to link KPIs to collective results rather than individual workstations, and to deploy employees with scarce skills deliberately. A solid integration with HR systems makes this plannable and transparent.
ORTEC tracks each employee's available skills and factors these in when assigning tasks, including for last-minute changes.
4. From spreadsheets to workforce planning: Why professionalisation pays off
Many manufacturing companies still plan their workforce in decentralised Excel files: per department, per shift supervisor, sometimes even per machine. The result: inefficiency, overcapacity, and a lack of overview. Centralisation solves this, but requires more than just a new system.
A degree of centralisation, for example: per cluster of departments, creates more uniformity and enables the sharing of workforce planning best practices. Planners gain better visibility of total capacity and can make trade-offs across departmental boundaries. That does require the right tools, skills, and mandate.
Professionalising the planning process also prevents problems with leave management, time registration, and reporting. More and more manufacturing companies are working with dedicated professional planners and clear processes for last-minute changes: who decides whether a vacant shift needs to be filled? What are the alternatives? Clear agreements on this reduce pressure on the shop floor.
ORTEC's solution enables centralised, uniform planning across multiple sites and departments, scalable and with real-time visibility.
5. Schedules with employee input: how employee satisfaction reduces staff turnover
Employee satisfaction is critical to retaining staff in manufacturing. And that satisfaction starts with having a say: employees who can submit their scheduling preferences feel more connected to the organisation. Research shows that employee input into scheduling significantly reduces staff turnover.
Contract preferences vary by generation, but the trend is clear: more permanent contracts, individual schedules, and self-scheduling are gaining ground. Some employees prefer to work more night or weekend shifts; others do not. A planning system that takes these preferences into account increases engagement and makes it easier to implement change.
Extra attention is needed for the difference in flexibility between permanent employees and their often internationally mobile temporary colleagues. Clear communication, ideally in each person's own language, is essential to ensure everyone feels part of the organisation.
Through the ORTEC app, employees can submit scheduling preferences, request leave, or swap shifts in their own language, supported by AI (LLMs such as ChatGPT).
How software and AI support workforce planning in manufacturing
ORTEC's workforce management software for manufacturing addresses each of these five challenges. These are the core modules:
- Demand Calculation: translates forecasts using mathematical models and conversion tables into the required number of employees per skill, reducing the need for last-minute adjustments.
- Shift and task planning: shifts are planned well in advance (giving employees clarity on working days and days off), while tasks are assigned closer to execution. This can be done per location or workstation and increases flexibility between teams.
- Optimizers: smart algorithms support planners in building feasible, high-quality schedules, taking all preferences and constraints into account. The planner always retains final responsibility.
- LLMs (such as ChatGPT): employees can ask questions or take actions via the app in their own language. Planners and managers are supported in automating decisions, such as approving additional hours or leave requests.
- Central environment: makes the solution scalable and suitable for centralised, uniform planning across multiple locations with real-time visibility and easy exchange between teams and flex pools.
Conclusion
Successful workforce planning in manufacturing requires more than a good schedule. Managing seasonal fluctuations, scaling flexibly, skills management, centralisation, and employee engagement together form the foundation. With the right software backed by AI and proven optimizers, this translates into less ad-hoc firefighting, lower planning costs, and satisfied employees who stay longer.
The planning process and IT landscape become more professional and uniform, while leaving room for the specific needs of each department. Manufacturing companies that invest in smarter workforce planning today are building a structural competitive advantage in a market where talent is scarce and every hour counts.
