The Wrong Question
Maintenance and production managers often frame workforce planning as a binary: should we hire permanent staff or use labour hire? Framed that way, the debate generates more heat than light, with finance favouring flexibility and operations favouring stability. The plants that run best in Queensland’s FMCG sector have stopped asking either or. They ask a better question: what is the right mix of core and flexible capacity for the way our demand actually behaves?
This article lays out a practical way to think about that mix, the genuine strengths and limits of each model, and how to make the two work together instead of against each other.
What Permanent Teams Do Best
A permanent maintenance and engineering team is the memory of your plant. Over years, your own people accumulate knowledge that never appears in any manual: which seamer runs hot, which conveyor drive fails first in summer, which valve on the CIP set needs coaxing. That tacit knowledge shortens every fault finding exercise and underpins every improvement project. Permanent staff also carry your culture, train your apprentices and give continuity to safety systems.
The economics reward stability too. For the baseline workload your plant generates every single week of the year, a permanent employee is almost always the cheapest way to buy an hour of skilled labour. The mistake is sizing the permanent team for peak workload rather than baseline workload, because then you pay peak prices all year for capacity you only need some of the time.
What Labour Hire Does Best
Labour hire earns its keep wherever demand is variable, urgent or temporary. FMCG is full of exactly that. Beverage volumes surge through the Queensland summer and ease off in winter. Shutdowns and line upgrades create short, intense spikes in trades demand. Resignations and long term leave punch sudden holes in rosters. Permanent recruitment for skilled trades routinely takes three to six months, and the line does not wait.
Flexible skilled labour absorbs all of this. You scale up for the peak, cover the vacancy while recruitment runs, staff the shutdown properly instead of stretching your team across it, and scale back down without redundancy costs. Contractors also bring cross pollination: a fitter or industrial electrician who has worked across a dozen FMCG sites carries solutions and habits your team may never have seen.
Where Each Model Breaks Down
Honesty about the limits matters. An all permanent model breaks down when demand spikes, when recruitment stalls, or when overtime becomes the default coping mechanism and your best people burn out. An all contingent model breaks down differently: site knowledge never accumulates, training and culture have no home, and you become dependent on provider quality with no internal benchmark to measure it against.
There is also a quality trap on the labour hire side. If your provider is a generalist agency, the people arriving may need supervision your team cannot spare. This is why the choice of provider matters as much as the choice of model. A tradesperson supplied by a specialist engineering business that works in FMCG every day arrives production ready; one supplied from a generic database may not.
A Practical Framework: Core, Flex and Surge
A structure that works well on Queensland FMCG sites splits trades capacity into three layers. The core is your permanent team, sized for the workload that exists every week of the year: preventative maintenance, routine repairs, continuous improvement. The flex layer is regular supplementary labour, often the same familiar contractors returning repeatedly, covering predictable variation like peak season, planned leave and known project work. The surge layer is on demand capacity for shutdowns, breakdowns and emergencies, which depends on a provider who can respond quickly, including overnight and at weekends.
The proportions differ by plant, but the principle holds: size the core for the trough, not the peak, and buy the difference flexibly. Plants that get this right typically find their overtime bills fall, their preventative schedules recover, and their permanent team turnover drops because the job becomes sustainable again.
Making the Two Workforces Work Together
The mix only works if contractors and permanent staff operate as one team. A few habits make the difference. Induct contractors properly rather than minimally, because an hour of orientation saves days of confusion. Pair returning contractors with the same areas of plant so they build site knowledge too. Feed contractor observations into your improvement system instead of losing them at the gate. And use a provider who sends you the same good people repeatedly rather than a rotating cast of strangers.
Continuity of provider matters here as much as continuity of people. When one partner knows your site, your equipment and your standards, every subsequent placement gets easier and better matched.
A Worked Example
Consider a mid sized beverage plant in Brisbane running two production lines. Its trades workload across the year averages the equivalent of six full time positions, but the profile is lumpy: a winter trough needing barely five, a summer peak needing eight, an annual shutdown needing twelve for a fortnight, and the usual scatter of leave and vacancies. The all permanent answer is to employ eight and carry the winter surplus, which is expensive, or employ six and thrash them every summer, which is how plants lose good people. The core, flex and surge answer employs five or six permanents sized to the dependable baseline, books two or three familiar contractors for the October to March peak and books them early, and draws shutdown labour from a specialist provider against a work list agreed months ahead. Overtime becomes an exception rather than a budget line, the permanent team keeps its weekends, and the plant pays for peak capacity only in the weeks the peak exists.
Where BevTech Fits
BevTech is a family owned engineering business with more than 25 years in manufacturing, specialising in FMCG and beverage production. Alongside supplying skilled industrial electricians, fitters, turners and automation technicians to plants across Brisbane and Queensland, BevTech delivers electrical and automation projects on Allen Bradley and Siemens platforms, precision machining and fabrication from its own workshop, and complete turnkey installations. Recent projects include can inverter block systems, refrigeration PLC controls for beer tank temperature management and hot water rinse CIP systems for can seamers.
That combination is precisely what the core, flex and surge model needs from a partner: people who are technically vetted by engineers, familiarity with FMCG environments, workshop and engineering backup behind every placement, and 24/7 availability when the surge layer is called on. If you are rethinking the shape of your trades workforce, talk it through with the team via the contact form at bevtech.com.au. The right mix is different for every plant, and the conversation costs nothing.
