FRP makers lay glass fibre and resin into moulds by hand or spray, cure the part, then trim and finish it. The people problem is skilled lay-up, fumes and itch on the shop floor, and moulds that only a few people know how to treat.
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Share your requirementsA fibre reinforced plastic unit makes tanks, panels, doors, cabins, covers, pipes and boat or vehicle parts. Work starts at the mould: it is cleaned, waxed, coated with gelcoat, then built up with glass mat or cloth wetted with resin, rolled out to drive out air and left to cure. After curing the part is released, trimmed, drilled, sanded and sometimes painted or fitted. Much of it is done by hand, so output depends on the feel of the lamination hand. Resin smell, fibre dust and itch make the floor hard to work on, and good hands are known across a cluster and easy to draw away with a few extra rupees. See also 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 FRP product 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.
Air pockets, dry fibre and thin corners come from rushed rolling, and the best hands are also the ones asked to hurry.
Catalyst ratio changes with weather and batch size, and the person who knows it by eye is hard to replace.
Smell, dust and skin itch drive early exits, and new recruits often leave inside the first fortnight.
Parts cannot be rushed out of the mould, so idle gaps and sudden rushes alternate and overtime is badly planned.
A scratched or warped mould spoils every part, yet its care is nobody's named job.
Pay per part pushes hands to skip rolling or finishing, and rework then lands on someone else.
Trimmers and sanders are moved between jobs and seldom see how their work affects the customer.
Gangs brought in for big orders work beside regular hands under different terms and training.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Onboarding and Probation; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Compensation, Payroll and Benefits. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
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.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
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.
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.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a FRP product manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A card per mould with layer order, resin quantity, rolling steps and cure time, kept at the bench and used for training.
A card per mould with layer order, resin quantity, rolling steps and cure time, kept at the bench and used for training.
One person per mould or mould group checks it before and after each use and logs damage, so loss is traced early.
One person per mould or mould group checks it before and after each use and logs damage, so loss is traced early.
Pay a part of the rate on parts passed first time, so speed does not push out care.
Pay a part of the rate on parts passed first time, so speed does not push out care. See compensation benchmarking.
A supervised start with short exposure, protective kit fitted properly and a buddy, covered in the onboarding process.
A supervised start with short exposure, protective kit fitted properly and a buddy, covered in the onboarding process.
Clear grades for roller, spray operator and lead hand, with sign-off on trial parts and a plain pay step at each level.
Clear grades for roller, spray operator and lead hand, with sign-off on trial parts and a plain pay step at each level.
A log of protective kit issued, ventilation checks and complaints about skin or breathing, in line with health, safety and wellbeing.
A log of protective kit issued, ventilation checks and complaints about skin or breathing, in line with health, safety and wellbeing.
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.
Routines and records for resin, fibre dust and ventilation, with kit issue and training logged.
Piece-rate and grade design that rewards good lamination as well as speed.
A careful first fortnight for hands who find the floor harsh at first.
A route from roller hand to spray operator and lay-up lead.
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 first-week plan for bringing in an outside specialist: what access to give, how to protect client data, and the confidentiality steps to settle on day one.
7 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead article
Simple variable pay structures for product and engineering teams: four options, why individual metrics backfire, a build plan and a one page outline to adapt.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Fit protective kit properly, limit exposure in the first days, pair them with a steady buddy and tell them what the first month looks like. Most early exits come from surprise, not pay alone.
It can work, but plain speed pay pushes out care. Part-pay the rate on parts passed first time and keep a daily floor so a slow day on a hard mould is not punished.
Write the lay-up standard, train a second person on each product family and give the skilled hand a visible grade. A resignation should slow a line, not stop it.
Kit issued, ventilation checks, complaints and who was trained. Ask a qualified professional which monitoring and medical checks apply to your unit.
Give them the same briefing, kit and quality card as permanent staff, name the supervisor who answers for them and keep their attendance on your records. Confirm the engagement terms with a qualified professional.
We would ask who sets resin ratios by eye, which moulds have no owner and how many new hands leave in the first month. A good first piece of work is a lay-up standard and a grade ladder. Scope is agreed in writing after we talk.
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