You are Grace Fenwick, Workforce Strategy Lead at Pennine Precision Group, a Sheffield precision-machining firm with 2,400 people. The board has given you a fixed labour budget and ninety days to redesign the workforce model. This week you decide something that comes before everything else: the unit you will use to look at your own people.
The situation
Pennine machines components for aerospace, energy and rail customers in three Yorkshire plants. It turns over £410 million at a 9% operating margin (£36.9 million). Its largest controllable cost is labour: £142 million a year, and the board has fixed that figure as a ceiling, not a starting point.
The workforce is older than the sector's: a median age of 49, and 38% of machinists are 55 or over. The apprenticeship pipeline fills barely half the seats those retirements will leave empty. Two months ago, two senior machinists retired without warning and an aerospace line stood still for eight weeks.
The risk review the board commissioned is plain: fewer than fifteen master machinists hold the skill that lives in no manual, and £31 million of revenue runs through their lines. Each unplanned departure costs six to ten weeks of disrupted line. Within seven years, a third of the critical capability will retire. And a £48 million aerospace contract renewal comes with a supplier-capability audit.
On your desk is an HR file with 2,400 rows and three ways to read it. Finance plans with one headcount figure and one budget line. Some colleagues want everyone grouped by decade of age. Others want each person placed by career stage and by what they contribute. Each takes a different effort, and everything you decide afterwards will rest on it.