Fewer Staff, Fluctuating Orders: Germany’s Industry Faces a New Planning Challenge

Aachen, September 9, 2026 – Germany’s industrial sector must continue adapting to short-term changes. In July, real incoming orders in manufacturing rose by 2.5 percent compared to the previous month. Excluding large-scale orders, however, bookings fell by 1.4 percent. At the same time, industrial production (manufacturing excluding energy and construction) declined by 2.2 percent compared to June.

This makes one question increasingly important for production managers: Does the available workforce still match the current production schedule? When volumes or priorities change, it is not enough to reschedule machines and materials. The right employees must also be in the right place at the right time.

In practice, this can become a bottleneck. A production line may be available, materials may be ready, and the order may already be scheduled — yet a short-term absence or missing qualification can prevent the planned staffing. Production or shift managers then have to quickly determine who can step in and what impact reallocating staff elsewhere may have.

“What matters is not only how many employees are available, but whether the right qualifications can be deployed at the right time,” says Thomas Freyland, Head of Workforce Management at INFORM. “When production plans change at short notice, managers need to quickly see whether the planned staffing will still work and what alternatives are available.”

Fewer Employees, Skills Remain Scarce

The task is becoming more challenging because staffing flexibility is shrinking in many industrial companies. At the end of the first half of 2026, 5.29 million people were employed in manufacturing. That was 144,100 employees, or 2.7 percent, fewer than a year earlier.

At the same time, 18.7 percent of industrial companies reported a shortage of skilled workers in July — 4.5 percentage points more than in April. According to the ifo Institute, this reflects the labor market’s matching problem: what matters is whether available qualifications fit companies’ requirements.

For manufacturing companies, this means that a nominally well-staffed shift schedule is not enough. Depending on the workstation, specific machine expertise, functions, or qualifications must be covered. In addition, there are working time and rest period regulations, collective bargaining agreements, company policies, and short-term absences to consider.

Identifying Replacement Staff More Quickly

INFORM addresses this challenge with its workforce management software, WorkforcePlus. The solution combines information about staffing requirements, qualifications, and available employees. If circumstances change, managers can check which qualified employees are suitable for deployment and which rules must be considered when reallocating staff. The final decision remains with the planner.

For production environments, WorkforcePlus takes into account qualification matrices, different shift models, and staffing for multiple machines. Legal requirements and company agreements can also be integrated. The system can additionally be connected to existing enterprise systems.

Employees themselves can also be integrated into the process. Through self-service functions, they can view shifts, submit preferences, or initiate shift swaps. This simplifies coordination without shifting responsibility for staffing away from production management.

“For production managers, what ultimately matters is whether the planned output is actually achievable with the available workforce,” says Freyland. “The earlier a potential staffing bottleneck becomes visible, the more options remain available.”

In an environment of fluctuating orders and increasingly limited staffing resources, shift planning is therefore becoming more and more of an operational task within day-to-day production. Not every bottleneck can be solved by hiring additional staff; some can be avoided if existing qualifications are deployed more quickly where they are actually needed.