Polish Labor-Shortage Concern: Should Businesses Look for Workforce Productivity Optimization Solutions?
By: Julia Saniewska
Tags: Business, Manufacturing, Lean, Poland, English

“Can Worker Tracking Help Me to Maximize the Utilization of My Existing Workforce and Increase Output?”

Managers of manufacturing businesses in Poland are seeking ways to handle the record shortage of workers. Of course, finding more workforce abroad is an obvious way to mitigate the problem, but it’s certainly not the only one. For a Polish manufacturing business struggling to keep the production volume unaffected by the crisis, a worker management system could be a cost-effective solution.

Let me explain.

Unnecessary employee motion (it includes walking, reaching, typing, or other movement that doesn’t contribute to the desired process outcome) is the most common productivity issue for manufacturing businesses. In fact, there’s evidence that an average warehouse worker wastes 6.9 weeks a year on unnecessary motion.

In Poland, issues like wasted motion are quite common in the manufacturing industry. For example, almost 80 percent of workers in a factory located in the Wielkopolska Voivodeship said that “unnecessary movement” was the most important factor that needed to be eliminated to increase productivity.

Importance of waste types according to Polish production workers.

Credit: Poznan University of Technology

For managers of manufacturing businesses, this means one thing: there are significant benefits for eliminating unnecessary employee motion, including increased productivity of shifts and individual workers.

But how can one identify the waste of motion, for example, during a shift?

This is specifically why real-time asset location systems (RTLS) were created. For example, our own RTLS, Indoorway, allows a manager to track an individual or a group of employees during shifts and identify unnecessary movement and waiting by giving them easy-to-carry location tags.

The location of the employees is displayed in the analytical dashboard, where the user also can replay the historical movement and see how employees work in real time. By tracking shifts consistently throughout, say, several weeks, the manager can:

see if their employees are working on value-adding tasks during the workday or a shift

identify motion waste and possible reasons for it

improve task assignment process

develop solutions to optimize shifts.

You can read this in-depth post on each of these benefits on our blog.

To help you analyze the collected movement data, Indoorway experts also prepare analytical reports containing graphs and charts with employee activity levels, shift performance data, and other useful information.

They are based on the data that was gathered by the RTLS (the accuracy of the data is ensured by the Ultra-Wideband technology that works well in heavy-metallic environments) and contain the information needed to understand how employees perform and where their productivity could be increased.

Real-Time Shift Tracking: an Effective Solution to Increase Productivity

With the labor shortage making quite an impact in Poland, local businesses are at risk. However, they can reduce the effect of this problem by maximizing the use of their current workforce with real-time employee tracking solutions.

As our experience shows, many production managers are surprised by finding out just how much wasted motion and waiting they can eliminate by making changes based on the workforce/shift/employee activity data.

If you would like to know how our real-time location system, Indoorway, can help to increase the productivity of all the shifts, feel free to visit our website indoorway.com or contact our experts for a consultation.