WoodDigest.com |

I am afraid my shop will go out of business. I just lost my finishing supervisor.” In wood products manufacturing many shop owners have found themselves in this uncomfortable situation.

Or you may be experiencing another scenario. Your lead finisher is leveraging your finishing team into his own comfort zone, which may not be in the best interest of your company. Good finishers often understand that they may be hard to replace; therefore, they may take the liberty to pursue an agenda that may not match the goals and directives of your company.

Either situation can be very unhealthy for your company. Good finishers are hard to find — or to replace — if they decide to pursue other interests. It is important to be able to replace and train new employees, or retain qualified finishers in your company. Human resources in finishing are your most valuable asset. Remember they represent the face of your product.

EMPLOYEE RETENTION

Providing the necessary resources to retain your finishing team and make them successful long term does not always require higher monetary compensation. The most common problems that demoralize employees and cause them to move to other companies are the work environment, workload scheduling and a finish process that does not perform well. Processes that cause excessive effort or reworks can be very frustrating to the finishing employee.

In the finishing environment, the employees need a clean, well lit work environment to feel positive about their jobs. Implementing a thorough preventive maintenance program will help employees maintain peak performance, and will reduce reworks and rejects. Using the best finishing processes and best practice standards will help ease the effort and workload of your employees.

An evaluation by your equipment or coating supplier, or by an outside consultant, can be very useful in finding recommendations for improvements to your finishing environment as well as your finishing process. A well ventilated work area will help keep your employees healthy and feeling positive about their job.

Scheduling the correct amount of time for the finishing process is a challenge for many manufacturers. There is a balance between taking too long finishing a job and not having enough time to finish a job properly.

We recommend doing actual time studies to identify the minutes required to perform each step of the finishing process. Don’t forget to include the total time from material handling, set-up and cleanup for each step of the process. If you are unsure that your time studies are accurate, you may want to check with industry specialists and industry standards to ensure your time studies are in line with basic process standards.

Once you have established actual standard hours, you will be able to schedule the correct time to allow your finishers to complete the job in a timely fashion. Allow some time in the schedule for rush jobs or potential reworks, so as to avoid missing completion dates. Many finishers work under extreme pressure to finish jobs where materials were ordered late or not built on time. In extreme cases, employers have lost valuable employees due to these scheduling issues.