(Cedar Rapids) — At least one Iowa manufacturing company is among the entities attempting to cope and evolve with pricing increases and labor shortages.
That’s according to Raining Rose Chief Operations Officer Kyle Hach, who says inflation and labor shortages continue to cause grief for his Cedar Rapids-based manufacturing company. Raining Rose manufactures various personal care products for an assortment of companies. Speaking on KMA’s “Morning Show” program recently, Hach says supply chain issues have begun to wain from a turbulent 2021, in which he says they often wouldn’t know when products would be shipping or the cost until the day of. One product, in particular, Hach says, experienced exponential price increases due to the Ukraine war.
“We are a large consumer of sunflower oil, and Ukraine is the number one producer of sunflower seed, so obviously the war there had an impact on our uses of sunflower,” said Hach. “The pricing in 2021 went up 30-60% depending on where you were getting it from.”
As supply chain issues start taking a back seat, Hach says labor has taken center stage. Particularly in how much turnover his company — which staffs roughly 300 employees — has experienced recently.
“As a manufacturer, typically our turnover was 15-20%, which is really good as a manufacturer — I’ll take that any year and I’m really satisfied with that,” Hach explained. “Last year, our turnover was 50% and this year our turnover is on track to be 50% again.”
In response, Hach says they raised wages 20% last year and expect another 10% increase going into 2023. However, he says it has been challenging to balance maintaining the company’s margin and remaining fair to customers.
Thus, Hach says Raining Rose is starting to take a closer look at how automation could provide more efficiency within the workplace. One of those areas is collaborative robots.
“Co-bots, is what they are coded in the industry, is becoming a pretty significant part of automation, and what that means is that I can be in the same area as that robot,” said Hach. “So you’re standard robots, for safety reasons, usually have cages aroud them and it took some pretty significant programming. Co-bots can be programmed by almost anybody in a matter of a couple hours and it doesn’t take a degree in software programming to figure it out.”
He added that collaborative robots also provide more flexibility in where they can be located in a facility. Hach says they have also introduced new software, “Redzone,” to enhance training further and establish a clear career path for employees.
Over the past two years, Hach emphasized significant planning on both their end and customers has become a priority.
“It really comes down to getting that forecast of what they expect their sales to be, and us on the supply chain side trying to plan that out as much as we possibly can,” said Hach. “And that’s worked pretty well, but is it a perfect system — no. You still have some things that get hung up along the way, and you still can’t control the price increases even with significant planning like that because the prices are evolving.”
For more information on Raining Rose and its efforts in dealing with labor shortages and inflation, visit rainingrose.com. You can hear the full interview with Hach below:
