PLC panel builders assemble control panels to customer drawings, wire them, test them and, on some jobs, commission them on site. Quality and delay both come from the wiring bench and the commissioning engineer.
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Share your requirementsA PLC panel builder makes control panels for machines and plants. A job begins with the customer's electrical drawing or the firm's own design. Enclosures are cut and drilled, MCBs, contactors, drives and terminals are mounted, and wiring is done to the drawing, ferruled and checked. Engineers program PLCs, drives and HMI screens, and some firms send people to commission the panel on site. Every job differs, so there is little repetition and much drawing reading. A technician who wires neatly and traces faults fast is valuable. Orders come in lumps tied to customers' machine dates, and site visits mean travel and long days. The engineers who commission are also those customers phone with faults. 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 PLC panel builders. 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.
A technician who ferrules cleanly and reads a drawing well works faster and leaves fewer faults, but cannot be hired off the shelf.
A customer revises the drawing mid-build, and unrecorded changes turn up as errors at testing or on site.
With delivery close, bench testing time shrinks, and the customer finds the faults the bench should have caught.
The same person does it all, and burnout or a resignation leaves a live project stranded.
A rush stretches the bench, a quiet spell follows, and both extremes strain people.
They pick up habits on the bench, good or bad, and no set path leads from helper to technician.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Compensation, Payroll and Benefits; Organisation Design. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
How many people, in which roles, by when, and what they will cost.
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.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
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.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a PLC panel builders business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A ladder from helper to senior technician, with panel types, drawing reading and fault tracing at each step.
A ladder from helper to senior technician, with panel types, drawing reading and fault tracing at each step. See compensation benchmarking.
One sheet per job showing each revision, who was told and which wires changed, signed before wiring resumes.
One sheet per job showing each revision, who was told and which wires changed, signed before wiring resumes.
A fixed testing stage in every job that the project coordinator and owner may shorten only by written agreement.
A fixed testing stage in every job that the project coordinator and owner may shorten only by written agreement.
A roster for site visits and fault calls, with a second engineer named on each project.
A roster for site visits and fault calls, with a second engineer named on each project. The attendance and shift process covers travel and time off.
A route from mounting and ferruling to wiring and then testing, with a senior reviewing each stage.
A route from mounting and ferruling to wiring and then testing, with a senior reviewing each stage. See learning and development process.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. Work through the checks using a recent operating period. The time needed depends on the records you hold; note missing evidence and use the findings to choose a priority.
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.
Technician and engineer grades with pay steps tied to what each can build, test or commission.
A planned path from helper to wiring technician and from technician to engineer.
Rosters for site visits, fault calls and time off around project peaks.
Clear duties for designers, programmers and commissioning engineers so one person does not carry everything.
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 can struggle 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
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 article
A founder's guide to building job grades, titles and billing levels for a growing IT services firm, with a step-by-step method and a grade description outline.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Recognise skill with a grade and pay step, give them clean, well-planned work and show a route to senior or testing roles. Technicians leave when work is chaotic and unrecognised.
Record each revision on a job sheet, brief the whole bench and pull the old drawing. A short check before wiring resumes catches most mistakes.
It is the last stage, so every delay flows into it. Fix a testing window in the plan and agree changes to it in writing, so it is a decision and not a squeeze.
Share fault calls and site visits on a roster, name a backup on each project and give time off after long site trips.
Keep a small bench of part-time or returning technicians for peaks, and use quiet spells for training and cross-skilling.
We would ask who can trace faults unaided, look at drawing revisions on recent jobs and see how site visits are shared. A good opening job is a technician grading scheme with a revision log. When the first conversation ends, the scope goes into writing.
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