Building capacity for changing demand
Few industries live with demand swings quite like steel fabrication. Chadi Bazzi, Managing Director of Talentblue, shares practical advice on planning a workforce that can flex with the pipeline without burning out the people who hold the business together.
Ask any fabricator to describe their order book and you’ll hear a familiar pattern. A quiet quarter where the shop floor is spotless and the leading hand is finding jobs for people. Then two tenders land in the same week, the program compresses, and suddenly the business needs a dozen qualified welders, a rigging crew and a second shift, all by the end of the month.
That volatility is structural. Infrastructure programs are lumpy by nature. Defence and energy projects run to timelines set elsewhere. The build-up to Brisbane 2032 will add another layer of peaks and troughs across Queensland and beyond. Fabricators sit in the middle, expected to absorb the swings while holding quality, safety and margin.
“Most businesses are good at planning steel, consumables and machine time against a project,” Bazzi said. “Labour is often the last thing to be planned and the first thing to be blamed when a program slips. Planning labour with the same discipline as any other input is where the real gains are.”
Know your core
The starting point, according to Bazzi, is an honest view of baseline workload. Not the peak month, and not the quiet one, but the level of work the business can reliably expect to hold across a year.
“Your permanent crew should be sized to that baseline, not to your best quarter,” he said. “If you staff for the peak, you carry people through the trough and the business bleeds. If you staff for the trough, you’re scrambling every time the phone rings. The core crew is the group you’d keep through anything, and everything above that line is the flexible layer.”
The core is more than headcount. It’s the supervisors, quality assurance staff, senior boilermakers and tradespeople who know the workshop’s standards and can bring new people up to speed quickly. In practice, that group determines how much supplementary labour a business can absorb at once.
“A good leading hand can carry three or four new starters. Ask them to carry eight and quality and safety start to slide,” Bazzi said. “So your flex capacity is set by your core, not by how many welders you can find.”
Plan labour at tender stage, not award
The most common mistake Bazzi sees is treating labour as something to sort out once a contract is signed. By then, the lead times have already been spent.
“The moment a tender goes in, someone in the business should be asking what the labour profile looks like if it’s won,” he said. “How many people, which tickets and codes, which weeks. Then overlay that on everything else in the pipeline. You’ll see the pinch points months before they arrive.”
Lead times vary sharply by role. Trade assistants and general labour can often be sourced within days. Coded welders qualified to a specific procedure, experienced riggers and dogmen, and crane operators with the right high-risk licences take considerably longer, and competing for them at the same time as every other fabricator in the state only pushes rates up.
Bazzi suggests a simple rolling view. “Look twelve weeks out and ask three questions every fortnight: what work is confirmed, what’s probable, and what’s possible. Plan firmly for the confirmed work, line up options for the probable, and at least know where you’d go for the possible. Most businesses only plan for the first category and get caught by the second.”
Scaling up without breaking the workshop
When the peak arrives, speed matters, but Bazzi is clear that speed without structure creates the rework and safety problems covered in his previous article. The businesses that scale well tend to have done the groundwork before the surge.
That means standardised inductions that don’t have to be rebuilt each time, clear job-specific competency checks ready to run, and a plan for who the new starters report to on day one. It also means being realistic about ramp rate.
“Bringing on twenty people in one week sounds decisive, but it usually means your supervisors spend that week inducting instead of producing,” Bazzi said. “Staging intake in groups, so each group is settled before the next arrives, is almost always faster in practice.”
Bazzi points to a client who needed to stand up two additional workshops to meet a project program. Both were staffed with vetted trades and productive within a fortnight, but he stresses that the fortnight was only possible because the labour profile had been mapped weeks earlier and the client’s standards were already documented.
For longer peaks, he also encourages fabricators to think about a second shift before a bigger crew. “Your machines and floor space are fixed. A second shift gets more out of them without the capital spend, and it suits a lot of tradespeople who want the hours.”
Managing the trough with the next job in mind
Scaling down is where Bazzi believes the industry does itself the most damage. Supplementary labour released at the end of a project with no communication is unlikely to return for the next one, and good tradespeople have plenty of options.
“The skills shortage isn’t just about finding people. It’s about not losing the ones you’ve already trained,” he said. “If someone has spent six months learning your drawings and your standards, letting them walk out with a text message is throwing that investment away.”
His advice is to treat the flexible layer as a known bench rather than a one-off transaction. Be upfront about project end dates, give notice, and tell people when the next peak is likely. Where possible, hold strong performers through a short gap with maintenance, training or workshop improvement work rather than lose them entirely.
Quiet periods are also the right time to upskill the core crew, run the weld procedure qualifications that will be needed on the next job, and convert proven supplementary workers into permanent roles where the baseline has grown.
“Every trough is preparation for the next peak,” Bazzi said. “Use it that way.”
Planning as a competitive edge
None of this removes the volatility in the pipeline. What it does is change how a business experiences it. Fabricators who plan labour the way they plan steel tend to bid with more confidence, mobilise faster when work is won, and hold quality through the peaks that catch others out.
“Workforce planning doesn’t need to be complicated,” Bazzi said. “Know your core, look twelve weeks ahead, stage your intake and look after your bench. The businesses that do those four things consistently are the ones still standing when the cycle turns.”
For more information, visit talentblue.com.au
A workforce planning checklist for fabricators
- Define your baseline. Work out the level of production you can reliably hold across a year and size the permanent crew to it.
- Map labour at tender stage. For every live bid, sketch the headcount, tickets and codes required by week, and overlay it on the existing pipeline.
- Keep a rolling twelve-week view. Review confirmed, probable and possible work every fortnight.
- Know your lead times. Coded welders, riggers and high-risk licence holders take longer to source than general trades. Plan accordingly.
- Respect supervisor capacity. Flex capacity is limited by how many new starters your leading hands can properly oversee.
- Standardise induction and competency checks so they can be run at short notice without reinvention.
- Stage intake in groups rather than bringing on a full crew at once.
- Consider a second shift before adding floor space or plant.
- Treat the flexible layer as a bench. Communicate end dates, give notice and tell people when the next peak is likely.
- Use the trough. Upskill the core, run qualifications and convert proven performers where the baseline has grown.
