By Todd Russell
Sometimes I come across news stories and don’t know how or if they fit here. It’s obvious when Stern Pinball expanded their manufacturing in 2023 that new jobs would be added, but something I didn’t know is their distribution between corporate/management and production level employees. That’s what we’re looking at in this article.
You might know that Stern Pinball in 2023 added an additional warehouse location.
Haven’t been there yet (pictured above), but oh my, it looks like a wonderous place. It’s on the bucket list to visit someday.
What might be lesser known, is they also applied for a property tax break for their new location — and according to the quoted article below it looks like they will receive this break for 15 years. Nestled within this business article, is a curious detail about the distribution type of jobs: corporate /management personnel vs. production staffing.
A village board report says Stern would invest $4.7 million into the new corporate headquarters on Busse (at Landmeier) including exterior facade and interior systems improvements. Stern moved some of its manufacturing operations from Melrose Park to Elk Grove Village in 2015.
The company would add 52 jobs to the new location, adding to the 139 corporate and 300 production-related existing employees who would be located at the new location. Some employees would come from the company’s Bensenville location to Elk Grove Village, village officials said.
Stern Pinball To Expand, Bring Corporate HQ To Elk Grove Village – Journal & Topics Media Group (journal-topics.com)
The article doesn’t state how many of the 52 jobs will be production-related vs. corporate jobs, but let’s assume the same percentage:
139 / 439 = 31.6%
If these ratios are maintained, that means approximately 16 of these 52 new jobs will be corporate, and 36 will likely become part of Stern’s production staff.
So, roughly 70% are manufacturing-related jobs, which means as long as they turning and churning new pinball machines, these jobs are relatively secure.
Is the 31% for management/corporate about normal for a company of this size? It seemed a bit on the higher side for management overhead to me, but thought I’d dig around and see what others thought.
Type of Work Performed
The work performed should dictate the management-to-staff ratio, not a companywide formula. Technologically complicated processes may require a smaller management ratio since there is a greater need for interaction and coaching. But, a call center doing low-level tasks at the same company could have a 15-to-1 ratio since the manager wouldn’t get involved in most calls. For example, a factory with hundreds of employees assembling products could have a high ratio and fewer managers to oversee more employees since the staff would largely do the same thing and individual progress doesn’t need to be reviewed regularly because of the limited interaction. Virtual workplaces and geographic distance also allow for higher ratios. Managers are not spending a lot of time training and coaching teams that work autonomously and everyone enjoys access to the information they need to get work done.
Ideal Ratio of Managers to Staff – HR Insider
Readers will need to decide whether or not there is corporate bloat happening at Stern, but if there is, you can bet that is filtering down into the price of the pinball machine customers are paying.
Now, besides if demand for new in box Sterns decreases, what else could take production jobs away? AI? Robots?
Any serious concern about robots taking human jobs at Stern? Zach Sharpe, Stern’s Marketing Director, refutes this idea, at least in 2023.
A Stern pinball machine, which takes roughly 16 months to design and 30 hours to assemble, includes 3,500 parts and a quarter-mile of wires — and it’s all hand-crafted.
“I couldn’t imagine a world where robots are assembling this because there’s so much love and passion put into these products,” Sharpe told Scripps News during a recent factory tour.
Inside the world’s largest pinball factory in suburban Chicago (ksby.com)
Looking at 10 years into the future, one of the earliest articles here on PGM (For the Low Price of $3,250 You Can Read This Report On the Future Of Pinball 2023-2031 – OR … Use Common Sense And Guess Along With Us), I speculated that in 10 years we’d likely see more AI-created artwork.