How to deal with the seasonality of the activity?

Unfortunately, production is not a long quiet river. It is made of meanders, eddies and rapids!

Once again, good management of the assignment of personnel to production positions makes it possible to see these variations coming, whether the origin is seasonality or other, to prepare for them as well as possible, and even to avoid some of these variabilities, for example, by better managing vacation schedules, the hiring of fixed-term and temporary workers. The result is an increase in performance.

Whatever the sector of activity in which your plant operates, it is confronted at one time or another with the seasonality of sales. To manage this in the best possible way, you need to be able to anticipate and adapt the operation of your production workshops during peaks of activity.

A good assessment of skill needs and an anticipated management of vacation requests should enable you to manage the planning process as well as possible. By correctly anticipating the approval of these leaves and the ordering of useful temporary workers you will be able to avoid any stock shortage but also overstocking,

This anticipation is therefore the key to good steering.

Similarly, during periods of low production (night, weekend, low season, …), “partial” workstations do not require a full-time workload. The workloads of the partial stations can be combined to reduce the required manpower. A systematic search for staff with combined skills allows for gains throughout the year.

Finally, seasonal staff are usually taken on from year to year. This has the advantage of limiting the training burden, especially for skilled positions. Having a usable history of previous assignments, training and skills acquired makes it possible to justify the choice of re-employment.

PeopleForce, a constrained planning software, allows you to easily respond to these different challenges. The optimized management of seasonality is therefore one more challenge that Synthetis’s planning solution takes up with ease !