A maker of industry-specific machinery builds equipment for one sector, such as food, textile, packaging or agriculture. This page looks at engineers, shop crews, trials and service teams who know the customer's process.
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Share your requirementsA maker of industry-specific machinery builds equipment for one customer sector, for example dryers, mixers, looms, sorters or presses. The value lies in knowing how that customer's process works. Application engineers visit the plant and write the requirement, designers draw the machine, fabricators and machinists build the frame and parts, assemblers fit drives, controls and guards, and a trial team tests the machine with the customer's material. Installation and service crews then go to the site, sometimes remote, to commission and keep it running. Orders are few and large, each machine slightly different, and the shop is busy and quiet in turns. Related reading: manufacturing HR. Process knowledge is the asset, and it lives in a small number of senior people, so the business needs clear ways to capture it, share it and keep installation crews and service engineers.
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 industry-specific machinery. 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 senior engineer knows why a design works for a given customer, and it is written nowhere.
A large order floods the shop, followed by gaps, and the team swings between overtime and idle time.
Weeks away at remote sites strain families and fair allowances are unclear.
Machines are tested briefly with customer material, and problems come back as site complaints.
Design changes after fabrication starts, and the shop reworks parts without credit.
One person handles spare orders and calls, and when away, customers wait.
Fit problems are traced to the previous stage in argument and not by record.
Juniors are sent to site early with little experience, and mistakes cost goodwill.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Career and Succession Management; Learning and Development; HR Strategy and Workforce Planning. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
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.
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 industry-specific machinery business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Write the key requirements, design reasons and trial results for each machine type.
Write the key requirements, design reasons and trial results for each machine type. Keep them under your HR documentation.
A view of orders against shop capacity, with a trained list of extra hands for peaks.
A view of orders against shop capacity, with a trained list of extra hands for peaks. Rules for overtime sit in the shift and leave process.
Allowance, stay, hours, return rest and approvals for crews at remote sites.
Allowance, stay, hours, return rest and approvals for crews at remote sites.
A trial plan, a record with customer material and a sign-off before dispatch.
A trial plan, a record with customer material and a sign-off before dispatch.
A change request route that counts rework time and informs the shop.
A change request route that counts rework time and informs the shop.
A staged path from workshop to site visits, with a mentor on the first trips.
A staged path from workshop to site visits, with a mentor on the first trips. The learning plan carries it.
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.
Process notes, trial records and role handovers.
Overtime and travel rest for peak orders and site work.
Staged growth from workshop to site.
Induction that teaches the machines and the customer's process.
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 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 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
How a D2C founder can decide which digital marketing work to hire for, which to buy from an agency, and which to split, with a worksheet and a five step plan.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Write the main design reasons and trial results, record interviews with seniors and pair juniors on live orders.
Plan against a rolling order view, keep a trained extra-hands list and agree overtime limits in advance.
Set clear per-diem, stay and rest rules, and apply them to all. Confirm obligations with a qualified professional.
Test with real material, record results and sign off before dispatch.
Freeze at defined points and use a change request that counts the cost and informs the shop.
Give them workshop time, shadow trips and a checklist, and send them alone only when signed off.
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