STIHL
Lösung: ATOSS Manufacturing Solution
Usage: CH, DE
Quantity: Employees 20,000
Innovation Born out of Tradition
Headquartered in the Swabian town of Waiblingen, STIHL is a German industrial company with operations in over 160 countries. STIHL develops, manufactures and distributes power tools for forestry, garden and landscape maintenance and the construction industry. Founded in 1926, the company has ranked as the world-leading manufacturer of chainsaws since 1971. With STIHL Timbersports, the company also hosts international sports events in a range of forestry disciplines. Digital workforce management features as one of the areas of the company’s digital transformation.
Throughout the Group’s near-100-year history, STIHL has always impressed as a highly innovative company. This has driven the company’s growth from a SMB into a global player – and from a traditional machine manufacturer into a market and technology leader in chainsaws and power tools. As it has grown, one basic aspect has never changed: STIHL is a family-owned company that aims to make life easier for people working with and in nature, while delighting its customers with innovative products. In order to remain true to this standard, the company also invests in innovating its operating processes. When it comes to workforce management, the company relies on the ATOSS Manufacturing Solution for around 7,500 employees in Germany and Switzerland.
At the STIHL headquarters in Germany, the second-highest annual production volume in the company’s history was achieved in 2021. In order to meet the vibrant demand worldwide, production was running at full capacity at all locations.
Numerous locations – complex collective and works agreements
STIHL is obligated to comply with collective agreements and numerous works agreements, resulting in great complexity. A multitude of varying shift options for the workforce and countless different accounting methods for additional or night shifts are not the exception but the rule for the company’s time management administrators. Highly complex, individual payroll accounting is the result. The solution the company used until recently was no longer able to map the complex requirements efficiently enough. And what is more, these systems were hardly fit for the future. All of the relevant processes needed to be optimized.
We are a family-owned company which makes life easier for people working with and in nature and delights its customers with innovative products. Because attractive working conditions are necessary for this, we are investing in, among other things, innovating our processes and building a modern system landscape.
Markus Dörle
Head of Human Resources | STIHL
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The step to digital transformation
For STIHL as a manufacturing company, the implementation of new tools entailed, among other things, a significant change in employee workforce scheduling. Several thousand people are employed at the Waiblingen and Weinsheim locations in production or production-related areas. And not only these employees are able to opt for numerous different shift models – STIHL is also offering many flexible part-time models. In addition to the various working time models, collective and works agreements must also be factored in at the different locations.
Innovative customized digital solutions
In workforce scheduling, many different workplace models need to be considered. Work models differ not only in planned working time, working time limits and core times but also in break times. Shift cycles which differ from the usual norm such as night shifts that are pulled forward – all this must be planned. To address such cases, STIHL developed an innovative customized solution in cooperation with ATOSS: specific work models are assigned to every employee in the master data, and these are displayed in the form of tooltips in the planning phase. As a result, the planner can only use the work or shift models available for each employee, which simplifies planning hugely and saves everyone involved a lot of time. In an additional planning screen, employees can also be assigned temporary shift responsibility, if no manager happens to be present. A note of this temporary, additional qualification is made accordingly in the plan and is therefore transparent. At the same time, the corresponding additional pay is generated, which is assigned automatically to the employee. The new self service has also created transparency. Besides the workforce, who now have a better overview of their own working time, figures and values thanks to the Staff Center, managers, too, can gain an overview of their teams and above all identify any potential need for action by way of customized reports – with just a few clicks.
Change management with a drive for innovation
Given this high level of complexity, close cooperation with representatives of different departments and the general works council was necessary during the project for its successful implementation. In addition, all employees needed to be familiarized with the new solution in the course of the transformation project: various user groups, such as time administrators and shift planners, were familiarized with the system by way of online training courses. An ATOSS information portal was also developed. More than 80 use cases were turned into short tutorial videos. Furthermore, a set of FAQs with over 80 questions and answers was compiled to accompany the implementation of the workforce management solutions and remains available to employees online at all times should they have any questions.
The implementation of the new solution at the start of 2023 marks by no means the end of STIHL’s commitment to innovation: the rollout of the Staff Center Mobile for 600 employees is on the agenda in the near future – marking a further step STIHL will take towards the complete digitalization of its processes. A step that demonstrates once again what it is that makes STIHL different: setting new standards with innovations.
Source: ATOSS Customer STIHL | Annual Report 2022
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