Panels are built to order from drawings: cutting, mounting, wiring, labelling and testing. Wiremen and testers decide how clean and safe the finished panel is, and every project has a hard handover date.
Not sure what you need? Tell us about your business in six short steps and we will come to the first meeting prepared.
Share your requirementsAn electrical panel manufacturer builds control, distribution and power panels to customer drawings. Sheet metal is cut and bent or bought as enclosures, then fitted with busbars, breakers, contactors, relays and meters, wired point to point, labelled and tested. Each panel is slightly different, so a wireman must read the drawing and the bill of materials with care. Projects have fixed delivery dates tied to a site, and a late panel can hold up a building or a factory. Staff include wiremen, fitters, drawing and estimating engineers, testers and site installation crews. Quality shows in the neatness of wiring and the accuracy of labels, which a customer's inspector can see at a glance. Related reading: HR for manufacturing.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in electrical panel manufacturers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Neat, labelled, correctly torqued wiring depends on the individual, and a project with three different hands looks like three different panels.
Revised drawings reach the floor after wiring has begun, and rework, overtime and blame follow.
Testing and documentation are squeezed into the last days, and corners are cut when the dispatch truck is waiting.
A wireman waits for one breaker, loses a day and is then pushed to catch up, with errors the result.
The person who signs the test record takes the blame for a failure, yet works under the same date pressure as everyone else.
Installation teams travel to project sites for weeks, with uneven allowances, long days and little recognition.
Assistants watch wiremen for years, and some never get a structured route to become wiremen.
The hours an estimator allowed are not the hours the job takes, and each side blames the other.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Performance Management; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a electrical panel manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A reference panel and a short checklist for wire dressing, torque, labels and cable entry, used in training and spot checks.
A reference panel and a short checklist for wire dressing, torque, labels and cable entry, used in training and spot checks. The learning and development process can support it.
One current drawing at each station, a revision stamp and a rule that wiring does not begin on an unreleased drawing.
One current drawing at each station, a revision stamp and a rule that wiring does not begin on an unreleased drawing.
A fixed test window per panel before dispatch, protected by the project lead, with a record of any shortening and who approved it.
A fixed test window per panel before dispatch, protected by the project lead, with a record of any shortening and who approved it.
A stores check that confirms all items for a panel are available before the job is issued.
A stores check that confirms all items for a panel are available before the job is issued.
A clear role description, authority to hold a dispatch and a team review of failures rather than single-person blame.
A clear role description, authority to hold a dispatch and a team review of failures rather than single-person blame. See performance management.
A record of days away, allowances and rest, with return-from-site leave.
A record of days away, allowances and rest, with return-from-site leave. See attendance, shift and leave.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A wiring standard, helper-to-wireman path and sign-off for testers.
Clear measures for wiremen, testers and project leads that include quality.
Records of overtime in crunch weeks and days away for site crews.
Hiring wiremen, drawing engineers and testers in a competitive market.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in manufacturing, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why the best operator often struggles as shift supervisor, what it costs the line, and a practical way to choose, prepare and back new supervisors in any kind of plant.
7 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead article
A practical design for an IT services appraisal cycle: when to run it, how to rate fairly across projects, and how to explain hikes so they hold.
7 min readRead article
Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
9 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Keep a reference panel and a short checklist, train everyone to it and spot check by project. Reward clean first-pass panels.
Use revision control and agree who can authorise work on an unreleased drawing. Record the cost of changes so the customer conversation is based on facts.
Yes, by fixing a test window per panel and making any shortening a recorded decision at project lead level.
Set a skill ladder with simple tasks first, a sample test and a clear promotion point.
Plan travel, pay allowances on time, record days away and give rest on return. Plan cover so one person is not always sent.
We would ask how drawing revisions reach the floor, how wiring quality is judged and how testing time is protected. A good opening job is a wiring standard with a helper ladder. Scope and fee are agreed in writing.
All 255 business types in manufacturing · Find another business type
Tell us what is slowing your team down. We’ll help you find a practical way forward, starting with a conversation.
