Hiring for a production ramp-up: staffing a new line or shift

A ramp-up is planned backwards

Start at the go-live date and work back: who has to be in place on day zero, who a month before, who earlier still. Seen that way, it becomes clear that the first roles to fill are not the operators but the people who will train them.

A supervisor or shift leader, a setter and a maintenance technician need to be there earlier, because they have to learn the technology themselves. If they start at the same time as the operators, there is nobody to lead them and the ramp-up slips regardless of how many operators were found.

The order in which the roles are filled:

1. Operational supervision and the key technical roles first
2. Then the setters and maintenance, who get the equipment running
3. Last the operator roles, in waves sized to training capacity

What has to exist before the first day

A number of things that happen in passing in an established operation are simply absent at a ramp-up and have to be created: work procedures, a training plan, risk assessment for the new workplaces, the scope of personal protective equipment, and the categorisation of the work, which determines the scope of occupational health assessments.

Occupational safety duties under Czech law attach to the workplace and to the employer, not to whether the operation is new. For a new workplace they therefore have to be prepared before anyone starts on it.

A new shift has different rules from a new line

Opening another shift on an existing line looks simpler but has its own difficulty. New people have to be trained by the existing team, which has to keep producing at the same time — so training capacity is taken out of normal output.

Candidate availability changes too. A night or weekend shift narrows the group of people willing to start, which belongs in both the schedule and the conditions. The difference between shift patterns registers with candidates sooner than a difference in pay does.

Where ramp-ups usually stall

In practice, ramp-ups are held up at a few recurring points, and the number of candidates is rarely one of them. They are worth going through while the schedule is still being drawn up rather than once people are already starting.

• Training planned optimistically, without allowing that the experienced person doing the training is not producing meanwhile
• A mismatch between the hiring date and candidates’ notice periods
• Transport and facilities for an unusual shift — changing-room capacity among them
• Missing procedures and documentation for the new workplace

Combining the routes

For a ramp-up it pays to separate the permanent core from the flexible part. The core — supervision, setters, maintenance — is worth filling by direct hire, because those are the people the most training is invested in.

The operator part can be covered by a combination of direct hire and agency employment, which allows for the fact that the real requirement usually becomes clearer during the ramp-up itself. That split is better decided in advance than during.