Higher employee satisfaction and productivity thanks to automated shift planning
Learn everything you need to know about the Siemens Energy case
The problem
No future with Excel - With a high demand for their product and a workforce of over 91,000 employees, Siemens Energy was faced with many challenges in staff scheduling. Challenges that affect almost all manufacturing companies above a certain size in terms of workforce and order situation:
coordinate staff absences at short notice
create a continuous workload of the machines
required expertise in the right place at the right time, taking into account the work-life balance
manual management of data
The mission: to automate all personnel processes as far as possible and not only solve the challenges of the present, but also uncover previously untapped potential. For Siemens Energy, however, it was not only important to adjust personnel requirements to the order situation or to reduce administrative efforts in planning. Rather, the focus was always on the involvement and satisfaction of the staff.
The solution
In October 2020, shyftplan went live at the Berlin location. The Nuremberg and Mülheim an der Ruhr locations followed shortly afterwards. Since then, we have been used to schedule employees in the required shifts and to handle important parts of employee communication. For the planners, administrative efforts and structural hurdles were solved by the programming interface (API) of shyftplan, which linked to the existing systems of Siemens Energy and thus prevented data breaks. After a very short period of time, the personnel planners and the staff experienced many changes, which gradually brought them closer to the specified goals.
"The agile project implementation was a perfect fit for shyftplan and for us as a service location. The complete implementation within four months in all workshops is proof that shyftplan and the implementation concept worked."
- Norbert Brunner | Siemens Energy
The result
A real success: the staff could be coordinated in the shyftplan software without paper and without media breaks, taking into account the machine capacities and order situations. This was an immense advantage, especially in the case of last-minute changes. Since Siemens Energy has to plan up to four months in advance due to the complexity of the production, there were many changes that were not considered in the original planning. At the same time, thanks to the digital solution, the employees could be integrated as needed. And that's not all: with us, the planners at Siemens Energy can
see at a glance which personnel is the most suitable for the job in hand
accurately retrieve all data in real time, so that sources of error are consistently eliminated
reduce the daily staff planning effort from 5 to 2 hours
"Instead of planning rigid 2- or 3-shift models, we can now give employees the opportunity to apply for their desired shifts independently. The tool automatically checks whether the framework conditions are met."
- Jan Tornow I Siemens Energy
Learn more about the state of digitalisation at Siemens Energy.
In this 4-minute interview, Siemens insiders talk about the current state of digitalisation at Siemens Energy.
