Induction Heat Treating

Northeast Ohio Induction Heat Treating Company Reduces Production Backlog By 1,500 Hours With On-Demand Labor

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When equipment and cooling problems pushed a Northeast Ohio heat-treating plant’s backlog above 2,200 production hours, restoring its machines was the first step toward recovery. The plant also needed people to run the equipment, pack finished parts, and move material. As production resumed, the need for additional labor shifted between those activities.

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The plant already had a Labor Pool of returning Veryable Operators who could support several work areas. With equipment capacity restored and those Operators supporting the recovery, management brought the backlog below 700 production hours in approximately three months without adding permanent headcount specifically to resolve it.

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The company specializes in induction hardening and furnace tempering. At the time, roughly 35 employees supported three eight-hour shifts, typically five days a week, handling approximately 175 active part numbers across about 35 pieces of production equipment. Automotive customers, primarily tier-one and tier-two suppliers, represented around 70% of the business, with other work serving aerospace, military, and lawn and garden applications.

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Customers generally expected turnaround in about 10 business days, depending on the queue, setup requirements, and process complexity. Yet work often arrived without advance notice, and equipment was shared across customer programs. That combination had already led the plant manager to seek a more flexible way to match labor to production requirements before the equipment disruption occurred.

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Building a Reliable Labor Pool and Expanding Its Capabilities

Before adopting Veryable, the plant struggled to get additional people into the operation quickly enough. Contract labor took time to establish, retention was inconsistent, and covering off shifts was particularly difficult. Recruiting part-time employees offered limited relief. During one two-week period, three applicants produced one person who started, one who accepted a higher-paying opportunity, and one who did not show up.

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The plant manager, whose background included Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma, was already exploring how to make labor available as production required it when a colleague introduced him to Veryable. After getting started on the platform, he worked with the local Veryable team to put it into practice.

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The plant kept its onboarding requirements in place. Every new Operator completed approximately two hours of HR onboarding, including safety training, and received a clock number before entering production. Their work could then be recorded in the plant’s existing system.

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Finished-goods packing provided a practical starting point. It could be taught relatively quickly and required less induction-hardening experience, while giving supervisors an opportunity to see how Operators followed instructions, approached safety, and worked with the team.

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Management used those first assignments to identify strong performers to bring back. Attendance, attitude, and team fit mattered alongside the ability to learn the work. As returning Operators demonstrated capability, they progressed to less-complex machines and jobs, then to more demanding work, including recurring production for larger customers.

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The plant also created skill-based categories for Quality, Maintenance, and Forklift work so that only qualified Operators could bid on those Ops. Through repeat work and deliberate selection, the Labor Pool developed the familiarity and capabilities to support more of the operation.

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Keeping Machines Running and Finished Parts Moving

The equipment disruption put that flexibility to work on a larger scale. A backlog that normally ranged from 700 to 900 production hours climbed above 2,200, while on-time delivery fell from around 98% to approximately 90% for a couple of months.

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Management began addressing the equipment and cooling problems while improving production priorities. As machines returned to service, the next challenge was making effective use of the restored capacity. The plant needed enough people to run the equipment and handle the work coming off it.

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Many finished parts required manual packing before shipment. Running more machines could increase heat-treating output while leaving work waiting to be packed or moved. Depending on the day’s production, the need for additional labor could shift between machine operation, finished-goods packing, and material handling.

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The Labor Pool gave management a way to support each of those activities. During the recovery, approximately 50% of Veryable hours supported machine operation, 40% supported packing, and 10% supported material handling.

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This coverage helped keep work moving while experienced full-time employees concentrated on critical, high-volume customer programs. Their process knowledge remained available where it mattered most, with Operators supporting the additional work required throughout the plant.

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“The goal was never to replace the full-time team. It was to make sure the full-time team was spending its time on the work that mattered most,” the plant manager explained.

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Flexing Labor When the Production Plan Changed

To coordinate that support, the plant manager built Veryable into weekly production planning. Early each week, he reviewed backlog, known incoming work, recent workload trends, machine availability, and expected labor gaps. By Thursday, he generally had a baseline for the following week’s Ops.

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That baseline established the expected need while leaving room to respond as conditions changed. If more machines were set up and ready to run than the available workforce could cover, he could request additional Operators. If incoming work exceeded the forecast, he could increase labor to support it.

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“The principle became: plan labor based on what we know, then adjust labor based on what actually happens,” he explained.

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At peak recovery usage, approximately 10 Veryable Operators worked each day across the three shifts. Most worked eight-hour Ops, with some four-hour Ops matched to specific needs. The plant typically used Veryable five days per week and sometimes six, receiving nearly 400 additional labor-hours in a typical five-day peak week.

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Working Down the Backlog Without Adding Full-Time Employees

With equipment capacity restored and additional labor supporting production, packing, and material handling, the plant worked its backlog down from more than 2,200 production hours to fewer than 700 in approximately three months. It added no permanent full-time headcount specifically for the recovery.

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The permanent workforce often worked Saturdays during that period, but only one seven-day workweek. The plant manager believed that without the additional flexible labor, recovery would have taken substantially longer and required much more overtime, including frequent seven-day schedules.

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As equipment stabilized and backlog declined, delivery performance recovered. The plant continued accepting high-volume customer work and did not rely on expedites as its recovery strategy. Equipment repairs, better production priorities, and the permanent team’s efforts worked together with the additional labor available through Veryable to bring the backlog back under control.

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Controlling Labor Costs During the Recovery

The ability to flex labor also supported one of management’s financial priorities: meeting a temporary recovery need without taking on permanent overhead solely to resolve it. Veryable offered a favorable hourly cost comparison as the plant considered its available labor options.

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The plant manager estimated the hourly cost of a Veryable Operator at $23.63, including Veryable’s 35% fee, compared with $35.32 for a regular production employee, including an estimated 45% burden. Overtime for a regular production employee cost approximately $36.54 per hour in wages alone, before additional burden.

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At those rates, management could bring in additional labor below its estimated fully loaded straight-time employee cost and below its overtime wage cost. It could then adjust usage as the workload changed, helping reduce overtime pressure while working through the backlog.

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The plant did not calculate an exact total savings figure. Job-level labor standards were not sufficiently developed, and manual packing requirements varied by product mix. Backlog was measured in production hours, which could not be converted directly into employee labor-hours. The hourly comparison therefore shows the economics of the available labor options, rather than a measured cost-per-unit reduction.

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Over time, this ability to match labor to the workload also influenced how the plant handled employee departures. Rather than automatically backfilling each position, the plant manager used the Labor Pool to help meet changing labor requirements. Across the broader period of using Veryable, full-time equivalents declined from approximately 35 to 22.

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More Control Over Labor and Production

For the plant manager, the lasting change was having more options when the workload changed. He could keep experienced employees focused on critical customer programs, bring back familiar Operators where work was accumulating, and increase labor without automatically adding another permanent position.

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During the recovery, that flexibility helped the plant put restored equipment capacity to work and move finished parts toward shipment. Across the broader period of using Veryable, it also changed how management approached employee departures and staffing decisions. The plant could make those decisions around the work it needed to accomplish, drawing on both its permanent team and a Labor Pool whose capabilities continued to develop.