The Personnel Lifecycle and the New MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model

Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair, based on an interview with Chris Monchinski, MESA Manufacturing Analytics Working Group Chair 

It should not be new news to anyone that MESA International is developing a new Smart Manufacturing Model. It covers a lot of ground with chapters on the lifecycles of supply chain, personnel, order to cash, product, production, and production assets.

The fundamental purpose of the new Smart Manufacturing Model is not to be descriptive in explaining what Smart Manufacturing does, but to be prescriptive by providing recommendations on how people can be smart in their manufacturing endeavors.

I recently got a chance to talk with Chris Monchinski, who’s heading up the Personnel Lifecycle team, to talk about what’s going to be in the personnel chapter of the new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model.

He said, “We’ve been managing the personnel lifecycle from hire to retire since the original industrial revolution. And, for the most part, we’ve been doing it reasonably well. What’s new is that we now have the enabling technologies we need to really do the job right. We have the technologies we need to streamline and optimize the task so that it’s not a burden on the organization and it’s continued to be done as well or better than it ever has.”

That’s very true. There’s no lack of technologies, very good technologies, that support the personnel lifecycle from hire to retire. Technologies that really do a good job of managing the lifecycle easily and effectively. But what makes it “smart”? I asked Chris this question.

He answered, “What makes it smart is that we can now integrate the personnel lifecycle in with the other manufacturing lifecycles. We can integrate these personnel technologies into the technologies of the other manufacturing lifecycles.”

That means we can now get an integrated view of training records. We can understand the full range of skillsets needed for manufacturing and who has and doesn’t have those skillsets. That means we can get the right people for the right job at the right time. And we can know who’s certified and who’s not for a specific task.

All that means that we should be much smarter at evaluating skillsets, at using people to improve productivity in the right ways at the right times, and should be much better at the planning and scheduling of personnel.

I asked Chris what business benefits we gain from all this. He replied, “The business benefits are tremendous. For the first time we get a thorough understanding of the skill gaps that exist. We get a good understanding of the training gaps. We finally understand the importance of change management and where it works well and doesn’t work well. We get a good understanding how well our training programs are working and where we need additional training and such. We finally get to implement HPWS and P4V programs the right way – the smart way. All because we finally have the personnel technologies we need and can integrate those technologies with the manufacturing technologies to get a complete solution.”

Again, that’s all true. With the technologies that enable the personnel lifecycle, and the integration of that lifecycle into the entire manufacturing process, we can now understand the skills required for a task and the people who have those skillsets. We can, for the first time, start to optimize the people as a critical resource, and maybe for the first time, really start to use people effectively and efficiently.

This is what’s going to be in just one chapter of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model. This chapter is on the personnel lifecycle and there’s chapters on many other key aspects of manufacturing operations. They aren’t academic and they’re not descriptive. They’re practical and prescriptive, dealing with how we can be smart in the real world.

Stay tuned for more looks into chapters of the new MESA International Smart Manufacturing Model.

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