3 ms·

Yeah, and that's not even remarkable. 70-90% of employees in a modern manufacturing facility will be in maintenance or support roles.

• lancewiggs 9y ago
  To emphasise this. The entire plant needs to be maintained, with daily, weekly, quarterly, annual and longer preventative maintenance schedules. Sometimes these will require taking down the whole plant for a week or two, other times for shorter times or the work can be done without interruption. There is also unplanned maintenance - when the plant stops working and a team is needed to get it bak up and running. For this yo gals need a warehouse full of critical spare parts - and people to manage it all. The plant also needs people working on product development (e.g. different wire materials and weights), process development (improvement in capacity to over name place capacity), health and safety (even with a hands-free plant like this there are plenty off hazards and a large amount of environmental and H&S compliance work), and so on. All these people need managers. And then there is demand management - figuring out what to make and when, goods inwards (and its quality control), dispatch and managing all the associated paperwork and QC. And there need to be people who make are those controlling computers and all the transmitters and controllers are working properly. and so on. But a laudable achievement nonetheless.
• test1235 9y ago
  Even in a software house - I worked at a company where there were 11 other employees for each developer (most of them salespeople).