Understanding the organization and site-level needs for frontline talent and matching demand and supply through dynamic scheduling are crucial actions. Talent planning in manufacturing focuses on understanding both organizational and site-level needs for frontline talent in the future. The most advanced sites layer skill-mapping (the process of identify the skills required for each role/position and the skills of every available employee) with their talent attraction and employee development plans, using innovative approaches that coordinate analysis and implications with strategic planning, integrating human resources analytics across all talent processes. They prioritize finding ways to address workers’ desire for flexibility, implementing advanced approaches to labour schedules (e.g. self-scheduling systems) to respond to changing demands and employee preferences while optimizing productivity. HR collaborates with business leaders to align people strategies with overarching organizational goals. Based on evolving strategies, job roles and responsibilities are regularly updated through ongoing redesign efforts, such as job audits. Finding and onboarding the next generation of shop-floor talent are crucial steps. Best-in- class organizations are continuously searching for qualified candidates through diverse channels; meanwhile, they maintain a prequalified candidate pool for key positions. They ensure that screening and hiring processes are fair and involve operational managers, often using automated tools and panel interviews. New hires undergo structured onboarding programmes to integrate into the company culture and develop necessary skills, with supervisors incentivized to improve performance and retention. Regular check-ins (e.g. at intervals of 30, 60 and 90 days) are often managed by a partnership between supervisors and HR.Driven by the need to provide increased flexibility for workers, especially new parents, Haier developed a novel “virtual industrial engineering system” that creates customized work instructions by position based on the product, the number of employees available and the available employees’ skill levels. Using AI algorithms, the system allocates tasks and assigns workers to stations to balance the line. It can generate new work instructions within three seconds, allowing flexibility to continuously rebalance the line. Operator satisfaction has improved, and the system has significantly reduced the daily workload of industrial engineering (IE) engineers, freeing them from tedious work to focus on higher- value tasks. The system helped Haier achieve an overall line balance rate improvement from 65% to 85%.CASE STUDY 8 Haier COSMOPlat’s dynamic line balancing affords scheduling flexibility – ChinaSchneider Electric’s Chennai site used digitized competency management system enables planning for global, regional and site-level competency needs while offering assessment and development tools for workers. Given the broad range – 11 technologies in technical competency with 131 sub-technologies, along with nine domains in digital competency covering 25 job codes – the tool helps managers identify priorities, set detailed plans, and choose the most critical technologies for current and future operations. The system also maps employee competencies and provides visibility on skills across sites, facilitating the borrowing of talent when business needs arise. Schneider’s “Be Green” metric was implemented to ensure at least two experts in critical competency levels at each site, supporting redundancy and process stability. The company has achieved 100% dual coverage for digital competencies at their sites. CASE STUDY 7 Schneider Electric’s competency management system enables smart talent planning – IndiaTalent planning Attraction and onboarding Putting Talent at the Centre: An Evolving Imperative for Manufacturing 19

Putting Talent at the Centre An Evolving Imperative for Manufacturing 2025