Today, I’ll be interviewing the president of a global clinical supplies company, Bob Albanese, who will help us understand the impacts of last-minute absenteeism in the manufacturing space. Bob, welcome to our show. We’re excited to have you.
April. Excited to be on. Hope I can be helpful.
Absolutely. So I’m going to start out by asking you a series of questions surrounding last-minute absenteeism in the manufacturing space, and I really just want to hear your true feedback on how you handle these situations. So my first question is, can you give us a little bit of background on the process you currently use to handle employee call-offs?
Sure. So I’d like to give you a little background on what we do in clinical supplies. It’s not well known. This is the packaging, labeling, and distribution of drugs in clinical trials. It’s very niche, very specialized, and very one-off. There are not many times that you do the same thing twice. It’s very rare. So, because of that, the employees not only have SOP training, they have work instruction training. So, not every employee would have the same set of instructions. So, an employee calling off, and just before they have work to do could be very disruptive to us.
All right. So it sounds like you have some pretty strict qualification management you need to deal with and make sure that those right people are in the right place. So tell me with the, maybe lack of processes you have for handling call-offs today, how effective is that to your business or what’s the impact there?
Sure. So the so the impact is great. One we’re providing life-saving medications to patients around the world. Not being able to package, label, and distribute on time could be, you know, detrimental to patients. On the financial side work that we don’t get done never gets caught back up. There are a couple of different reasons why not getting the work done matters.
Yeah, that absolutely sounds like you guys run a very scheduled routine and things have to get done at the right time. Otherwise, there are detrimental impacts. What would be the most common reason that an employee calls off? Why are you seeing such an influx in that type of behavior?
Yeah, a little bit of both. I don’t think there’s one reason. So we do have a large contingence of hands-on staff, younger people. Young mothers, young fathers, so child problems. Now, we’re a family-oriented company, so we understand these things happen. But a lot of times the parents don’t know they’re going to have a problem. It could be daycare close. The kid woke up with a fever and they’re not allowed to go to school. A multitude of things.
As you know, we went through COVID a few years ago, and although we needed to keep working in this industry to provide medication to people, the parameters were much stricter. If you feel like you might not be up to 100%, don’t come to work. And that was a judgment call. And you know, people had to make that at the last minute.
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely know the hardship of being a new mom and having the schedule around daycare, that can definitely be tough. So with that, do you think having a tool that would give your employee the autonomy to manage their own schedule and handle their own absenteeism would be a benefit to your organization?
I think it would. One of the bigger things would be the earlier we can find out the better. You know, in our current model, our employees, if they don’t know the day before, and if they did know, it wouldn’t be a surprise, but when they do know, they have to wait till we open at 7:00 AM to make that call. We want to start working at 7:30 AM, so that doesn’t leave management a lot of time to react to that. You know, to have a system where they could let us know as soon as possible could absolutely be helpful.
Yeah. And so it sounds like without the system you’re actually putting yourself in a position to have more last-minute call-offs than what you would possibly intend to have with a system if they were able to utilize it in advance. They’re almost forced into having to call the day of because they have to have access to people, right? So that’s good to know.
With that, you had mentioned earlier in our review about the impact on things that have to get done. If it doesn’t, it’s just pushing something else out. So it sounds like there could be a really big impact on your revenue model due to the tight scheduling criteria that the pharmaceutical companies have. So can you kind of expand the impact of that with last-minute absenteeism?
If we have any employee that calls out last minute and they have job-specific training and no one else has it. We’re going to pull someone off of another task. And once we do that, we cause that task to be short. And it’s a bit of whack-a-mole where it goes throughout the industry, throughout the environment. If we had a better system to understand who was training what and to make one big move instead of many moves and finding out later in the day that we disrupted something else, that’s really, most of our callouts end up causing us two or three shuffles throughout the day. So it’s not one late packaging. It could be two or three.
Right. Yeah, exactly. I’ve actually seen that with not pharmaceutical, but more of my CPG clients where they also do the shuffle, right? They have to make sure this person gets rotated there based on qualifications and the manual manipulation of doing that in your head as a supervisor can actually lead to errors. Have you seen that before?
Yes, and in a system in an industry where we have to document all of our errors, even leads to more work and more time because of the documentation of the errors and reporting back through the industry best practices on how we’re going to alleviate those errors from happening again next time.
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess that kind of leads us to my next thought. You mentioned a little bit, but can you go into more detail about how a centralized call-off service would benefit your scheduling processes and how it could really help your business?
Sure. So I would assume that there’s a centralized call-off. It’s tied to our schedule or to our scheduling software and then to our qualification software and to have the system be able to use its own algorithms to go through and give us suggestions for first thing in the morning when we come in. Hey, three people called off or one person called off, here’s what we suggest you do. It would save a lot of management time and we get us back on the shop floor quicker, which is what we need to do.
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s the real problem that we’re trying to solve here at Indeavor. We’ve noticed that we have our clients on these separate systems that don’t talk to each other. They’re not saying what needs to happen next. Where Indeavor closes the gap is we provide that call-off service for our customers. And then as the supervisors and managers come in for the day. They’re now able to, at the tips of their fingers, make that decision by a click of a button, really, because the algorithms that you speak of, the way we schedule, already have your work rules in place, right?
So it’s already making those shuffles, and it’s probably going to take the least amount of shuffling to get it done, right? Where you took three people to shuffle into the backfilling job. Our generation is going to maybe only have to take one person in backfill, and it may take it from the least impactful job. That’s super relevant to how Indeavor works. And that is really good feedback. So I appreciate that. The last thought I want to tie up the interview with is explaining how real-time reporting analysis of unscheduled absences ties to your operations and how do you expect a call-off service to deliver on this?
Sure. We, can measure and have metrics on what the call-off impact was, not only prior to the system but post-implementation of a system, so we can really get a return on our investment. We can see that not only in a monetary fact but as I said, we need to service our patients. We really want to understand what impact we’re causing downstream to others. We’re not the final consumer of our product.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s amazing. I appreciate all the time today and I do have to ask, it’s my job. Do you think Indeavor Call would be a good fit for you and your company?
I think it’s worth further research.
I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for the insight on unplanned absences. At the very least, I learned a lot about clinical supplies today. Thanks for coming today.
