Deliver Best Practices: Importance of Human Resources in Manufacturing

There is no question that a company’s success is determined by their people. Employees that are satisfied with their jobs are more productive, loyal, produce happy customers and positively impact the company’s profitability. Accomplishing that, however, is a task that requires a lot of focus and dedication especially from company’s human resources groups.

In the past, the function of human resources (HR) departments and professionals was more reactive, process-driven and service-oriented. However, that has changed. With businesses internationalizing their operations, human resource departments around the world are faced with challenges that did not exist two decades ago. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Survey of Global HR Challenges revealed that today’s top human resource management challenges include change management (48%), leadership development (35%), HR effectiveness measurement (27%), organizational effectiveness (25%) and recruitment of skilled labor (24%). Today’s human resources groups have evolved into key organizational functions acting as proactive business partners and often times directly reporting to company CEO’s. Considering that every industry has it’s challenges, in manufacturing the biggest challenge facing the business as well as HR is velocity.

“From an HR perspective, considering the speed at which you need to execute production ramp-ups, you not only need to hire people quickly, train them on how to build a product correctly, but also ensure that many of these key people will stay and are ready for the next ramp up.  That’s why it’s important to set clear expectations, recognize the people, and celebrate together when we meet customer commitments and needs,” said Philip Hubbell, Jabil’s Vice President of Human Resources.

Training is particularly important in the manufacturing industry. From On-boarding to on-the-job training, it’s crucial that all employees not only understand how to build a product, but also how to be at minimal risk of being injured or hurt. “We have 180,000 employees that equates to 180,000 families that we support and that support us. It’s a big responsibility that we have. We all need to ensure we give our people a safe environment and a great place to work,” he continued.

In a global environment, where challenges facing the various functional groups across the regions can sometimes be very similar despite the cultural differences, building a community that shares best practices in an open manner is key to success. “Best practices sharing is important across the company. We cannot have divisions or sites or regions that have a great way to do something and we don’t leverage that. We have to have mechanisms to share and adopt these,” said Hubbell. At Jabil, we have forums at which HR leaders from across the different regions discuss and share their good practices on a monthly basis.

Moreover, Jabil’s HR organization is an example of how Lean became part of our organization from production to back-office functions. Lean, a methodology focused on recognizing and eliminating waste, is now part of conversations among the HR community worldwide. But what does waste look like in HR? It includes anything from extra processing and layers of approval levels to misaligned human talent and skills. In fact, Jabil’s top eight Lean Six Sigma projects pertaining to the HR-function will be presented at the 2014 Deliver Best Practices Global Competition at Jabil’s Headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida on October 16. Three of these projects will advance to the competition finals on October 17.  Among this year’s eight final projects, there are varied project including improving days in inventory targets, developing activities to promote employee engagement, and a user-friendly HR portal resulting in greater employee satisfaction and significant savings.

Building a culture in which everyone, everywhere is constantly focused on streamlining processes to eliminate waste and add value is crucial to any business. Applying Lean to Human Resources function has proven beneficial not only to the HR organization, but also to the bottom line. And even though, manufacturing companies might have different challenges than other industries, regardless of the industry, the most important asset you have are still the people.