A gearbox maker machines housings and gears, assembles them to tight fits and runs each unit on a test bench. The people problem is a few fitters who feel a bad mesh by ear and hand, and service teams who travel to customer plants.
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Share your requirementsA gearbox manufacturer makes reducers, worm and helical units, geared motors and industrial drives. Housings are cast, then machined on boring and milling machines. Gears and shafts are made in house or bought in, and every unit is assembled with bearings, seals and oil. A fitter checks backlash, contact pattern and noise before the box goes to a test bench. Orders are often for single units or small lots with different ratios and mountings, so the line is rarely repetitive. A leak or a whine at a customer's site comes straight back to the plant. Service engineers carry repair knowledge that sits in few heads. 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 gearbox 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.
Contact pattern, backlash and noise are read by eye and ear, and the few who can do it quickly are overloaded.
Frequent variants mean steady learning, and a fitter new to a model makes slow or wrong assemblies.
Only a couple of people trust the readings, so finished units wait for their turn before despatch.
A noisy box is blamed on machining, gears or assembly in turn, and nobody owns the root cause.
Stores and fitters find mismatches late, and who should have caught them is argued after the fact.
Overhauls at customer plants mean travel and long hours, with little record of days away or rest.
Housings and shafts are handled by hand and hoist daily, and training on safe lifting is informal.
Juniors stand beside a fitter for months with no written route, and the best leave once they can fit a box alone.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Career and Succession Management; Health, Safety and Wellbeing. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
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.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
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 gearbox manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Name the families, such as worm, helical and bevel, and the grade each fitter holds, tied to a clear pay step.
Name the families, such as worm, helical and bevel, and the grade each fitter holds, tied to a clear pay step. See compensation benchmarking.
Torque, shim, backlash and oil quantity at the bench, updated by the senior fitter and checked by the supervisor.
Torque, shim, backlash and oil quantity at the bench, updated by the senior fitter and checked by the supervisor.
A planned route to read torque, temperature and noise records, signed off on real units, as set out in learning and development.
A planned route to read torque, temperature and noise records, signed off on real units, as set out in learning and development.
Record where a fault was first seen and what the part state was before, so the talk turns to the process.
Record where a fault was first seen and what the part state was before, so the talk turns to the process.
A simple record of days away, call-outs and rest for each service engineer, linked to allowances through the attendance and leave process.
A simple record of days away, call-outs and rest for each service engineer, linked to allowances through the attendance and leave process.
Skills from fitting bearings to full assembly, each signed off, with a visible grade at the end.
Skills from fitting bearings to full assembly, each signed off, with a visible grade at the end.
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 route for apprentices and fitters to move from simple units to full assemblies and bench testing.
Grades and pay that reflect assembly skill across gearbox families.
Records for lifting, oil handling and test bench practice.
Rules and records for service engineers who work away from base.
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 two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
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 articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Write assembly cards, pair juniors with seniors on planned jobs and sign off each step. Give the senior fitters a visible grade so teaching is part of the role.
At least two people, trained on real units and signed off. One person must not hold the readings alone, or despatch waits on them.
Record where the fault was first noticed and the part state before. With facts on the table, the review is about the process rather than a person.
Define allowances, travel days and rest in writing and record them. Ask a qualified professional how these interact with your employment terms.
Give a short list of tasks with sign-off, put them with a named fitter for fixed periods and review progress monthly. Training should be planned, not left to spare time.
We would ask which models only two fitters can assemble, how many people can read the test bench and how service travel is recorded. A good first piece of work is a fitter grade ladder by gearbox family. Scope is agreed in writing after we talk.
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