Workforce Planning & Action for Milking Machine Technicians

Above: Farmers were surveyed to better understand how they service their milking machines and access technicians

Project description

The need:  Milking machines work every day of the year. It is therefore essential that the equipment is regularly serviced and issues are quickly found and fixed, a function carried out by professional milking machine technicians. With the numbers of milking machine technicians halving between 2000 and 2010, there was concern that farm productivity and profitability would be adversely affected if the decline continued.

What we did:  The Harris Park Group worked with a Milk Harvesting expert (Professor Graeme Mein) and Workforce Planning consultant (Kim Windsor) to assess the workforce issues relating to milking machine technicians and recommend a path forward. Understanding of the situation faced by those in this sector was built from interviews with senior management of all five Original Equipment Manufacturers, the principals of 12 dealerships, and online surveys of the milking machine technicians and 15 farmers in regions with low density of farms (‘thin markets’). Preliminary recommendations were refined at an industry workshop.