Technical deficit

Around 8% of all jobs in Britain’s factories are for process, plant, and machinery operators. And many companies are having real problems in recruiting the right sort of workers to maintain and get the best out of today’s automated production equipment. Right across the UK’s manufacturing industry there is a shortage of recruits with a basic technical understanding of what lies under the covers of today’s production line equipment.

But these difficulties are just a flea on an elephant’s back compared to the difficulties food and drink manufacturers face. According to Improve, the food and drink industry’s skills watchdog, there are five times as many jobs in the food industry for production line workers (38%). Recruits with even a minimal understanding of pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics, mechatronics, automation and control systems, are a rare sight on bottling, packaging, and processing lines.

And this technical skills shortage is not being made any easier by the growing lack of basic numeracy and literacy among Britain’s school leavers, and among the immigrant labour-force upon which the food industry is highly dependent. Even if recruits do understand how to operate a packaging line they can still be stumped by the error and operating messages flagged up on the line’s supervisory control and data acquisition software.

The result can mean frequent stoppages and unnecessary downtime – not good if you’re under pressure to complete a large order for a major supermarket.

The most visible result of this skills shortage is that production machinery operators with some technical or engineering skills and knowledge go where the pay is best – and that is not into the food industry. Also, some of the larger food companies are now having to find the cash and time to invest in special training and upskilling courses for their own operating and maintenance staff.

Another effect is that the number of overseas workers filling managerial, skilled, and semi-skilled jobs is shooting up as companies discover that there is actually a high percentage of skilled workers among the overseas nationals they have taken on to fill basic unskilled jobs. And some companies are taking a hard-nosed approach to skills shortages. They are simply firing their production line workers and offering the jobs to their existing technical and maintenance staff.

Novel experiment

Not all is doom and gloom, however. Improve is about to embark on a novel experiment to address this shortage. It hopes to launch a scheme in which a number of major food companies, supported by government cash, will between them train more technician operators than they need. The idea is that surplus trainees will be available to the rest of the food industry.

According to the latest figures from Improve, more than half of all reported job vacancies in the food and drink industry are for process, plant, and machine operators. And these jobs account for over half the industry’s reported “hard-to-fill” vacancies. Food companies are trying to reduce the lines of reporting in production by placing greater responsibility at operator level for quality and the efficient running of lines, says Improve.

What companies want, says Jack Matthews, Improve chief executive, is operators who have technical know-how, but who also understand the food and drink industry’s imperative to keep production lines running 24/7 and to keep downtime and stoppages to an absolute minimum. “Margins are constantly being squeezed by the large multiples and companies want people who can not only run and maintain a machine, but can also look at how to improve it.

“But there is a shortage of engineering skills nationally. And we are competing with the rest of the manufacturing industry, particularly the process industries such as chemicals, polymers, and petrochemicals, where they pay premium rates to get exactly the same sort of person we’re after.”

So the only way many companies can gain these skills, says Matthews, is by sending operators on specially designed training courses. “There’s no such thing at the moment as a truly integrated approach to both food manufacturing engineering and food manufacturing as a process.”

Improve is currently undertaking a skills analysis of the food sector and it is becoming clear, says Matthews, that a significant number of technical vacancies are now being filled by overseas nationals. “About 30% of overseas workers are now in managerial and supervisory jobs, 30% in skilled and semi-skilled jobs, and 30% in basic processing jobs. It is an untapped source of talent.”

The research also shows that the skills shortage gets worse as companies get bigger. “We have found that once companies get over about 200 people, it becomes a very serious issue,” says Paula Widdowson, commercial director at Improve. “We don’t yet know why. And it doesn’t seem to matter where you are or what you do either.

“Maybe it is because the bigger companies simply drain the local labour pool. Or maybe as they get bigger, companies get very complicated in what they’re doing and so the type of labour they require gets more difficult to find.”

One result is that a number of bigger companies have abandoned the search for technically competent staff, says Widdowson. “Instead they are taking on anyone so long as they have the right attitude and ability to learn, and then they will train them on their own courses.”

In the meantime, Widdowson is hoping to persuade three or four top names – most probably including Coca Cola, Young’s Bluecrest and Weetabix – to take on between them 30 or 40 recruits and train them up as engineers, fitters and technologists. But because these companies will only actually need 20 or so trainees, the aim of the scheme is for the people surplus to requirements to be recruited into the rest of the food industry, fully trained, explains Widdowson. “We hope to have the scheme in place by December.”

Creeping tendency

But Steve Land, food and packaging specialist at pneumatics and automation supplier Festo, says there seems to be a creeping tendency by some companies to tackle the shortage of technical skills by firing their process plant operators and asking their existing engineering staff to do the job instead.

Some food manufacturers will decide that their existing workers don’t have the ability to learn how to operate and maintain equipment efficiently, says Land. “So it is not unheard of for them to make groups of workers redundant and then ask their existing tradesmen – fitters and electricians – to apply for the production line operators’ jobs, but with a broader, multi-skilled role. We see that happening more frequently.”

Another approach, says Land, is for companies to change the job specification for recruiting new production line operators so as to attract people like mechanics and electricians. “But whatever way, what they often end up with is a big turnover of staff in a short period, which means that a big training programme is needed.”

In many companies the traditional division between production line operators and maintenance can actually prevent them getting the best out of machinery, suggests Tim Fox at Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) North West. “Maintenance is frequently seen as the crew that fixes equipment, and operators as the people who break it. You have two warring factions.” The result, he says, is that resentment builds up over time.

Fox is responsible for process improvement and productivity at MAS North West, the government’s advisory service for the region run by the Manufacturing Institute. He helps companies diagnose their productivity problems and provides training to improve processes and productivity.

Fox specialises in total productive maintenance (TPM) or, as it’s sometimes called, total productive manufacturing. “If you have a piece of kit, you have to maintain it. But with good maintenance, you can improve it.”

The problem in many companies is that the only training that line operators get, says Fox, is to be told: press this button to make it go; press that button to make it stop. “This lack of knowledge can put the fear of God into operators because they just don’t know what to do if things go wrong. I see it in the food industry all the time – people don’t know what the kit does or how it does it, so they are afraid of what it can do.”

Fox uses the techniques of TPM to help operators and maintenance staff understand their equipment better, what it does, how it does it. It works wonders, he says. People take ownership of their equipment, they communicate, and there’s much more enthusiasm. “Once people understand their machinery, they feel they have a voice and that enables them to talk effectively about problems and find solutions.” FM