Picture an HR manager at a mid-sized builder on a Monday morning. Two roles are still open. A crane operator’s ticket lapsed on Friday. And the site supervisor wants to know who’s actually free for the job starting next week.
That’s the daily end of a much bigger problem. Infrastructure Australia projects a shortfall of more than 300,000 construction workers by mid-2027, up from an estimated 141,000 in October 2025, according to a summary of its 2025 market capacity report published by Austra College. Jobs and Skills Australia rates every construction trades occupation it tracks as in national shortage. Manufacturers aren’t immune either.
HR can’t fix a national shortage. What it can fix is the data it works from, and that’s the part of ERP solutions that rarely gets talked about.
Why hiring skilled trades keeps getting harder
You’d expect softer economic conditions to ease things. They haven’t. Jobs and Skills Australia’s March quarter 2026 report put the national vacancy fill rate at 68.2%, down from 69.1% the quarter before and 3.3 percentage points lower than a year earlier. Regional employers are doing worse than city ones, and that gap widened to 4.6 points. Skill Level 3 roles were the hardest of all to fill, at 55.5% against roughly 70% for the other groups.
Still, the number of people applying isn’t always the problem. A 2018 government survey, cited in a 2020 workforce profile from South Australia’s Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), found employers getting about 12 applicants per vacancy. Of the qualified ones, 67% were judged unsuitable. Missing licences, thin experience, gaps in technical skills. To me that reads as a screening and records problem as much as a supply one.
What ERP solutions can do for HR, beyond payroll
Most people hear "ERP" and think finance. The Australian Government’s ERP human capital management standard paints a wider picture. It lists recruitment, onboarding, workforce planning, rostering, time and attendance, learning, and safety training and qualifications as capabilities that sit in the one platform.
The bit worth paying attention to isn’t any single module. It’s that they share one employee record. SAP argues something similar in its workforce intelligence writing: connect people data to business data and hiring and retention decisions improve. Fair enough, though a vendor would say so. The point stands whichever product you pick. If the roster can’t see who’s certified for what, somebody checks by hand.
Rostering and planning labour against real demand
Take a manufacturer running two shifts. Production planning knows next month’s orders. HR knows who’s on leave, who’s casual, who holds a forklift licence. Keep those in separate spreadsheets and the roster gets built on guesswork, then fixed on the floor at 6am.
Tie the two together and rosters follow the work schedule. Overtime and gaps show up before the shift rather than in the payroll run afterwards. That’s why manufacturers increasingly want ERP solutions for manufacturing businesses, specifically, than a generic back-office package.
Where the partner sits matters less than it used to. Many ERP projects now run through remote workshops and phased go-lives, so you aren’t limited to a consultancy in your own city. Australian-based providers are one option for overseas manufacturers, especially those wanting a team that knows MYOB Acumatica. A standalone rostering tool is a perfectly reasonable alternative for some firms. The ERP route earns its keep when payroll, production and HR records have to agree with one another.
Either way, expect work. Tidying employee records and settling how award or agreement rules apply takes time before anything goes live.
Keeping licences, tickets and training in one place
Construction HR runs on paperwork that expires. Site inductions, licences, safety certifications. The Australian Government standard describes catalogues of training and qualifications, with safety roles recorded against individual employees. The system should know who’s cleared for what and warn you before a ticket lapses.
Even the bodies tracking this at state level admit their numbers have holes. The CITB profile found 15.2% of the 46,922 workers it counted had commenced a CITB-supported apprenticeship or traineeship. It said that understates the qualified workforce, because people who trained interstate, overseas or with an ineligible employer aren’t counted. It put the average training rate across major trades at 11.5%, against a 15% benchmark it cited as necessary to replace people leaving through retirement and the like. Its own measure, it added, probably understates the true rate.
If a state body struggles to see the full picture, a company without central records will struggle too. That’s the HR manager ringing round the crew to find out who holds a particular qualification. Central records end that, and they show where your own training rate sits before a shortage forces the question.
Using workforce data to improve retention
The CITB profile makes a distinction employers often blur. Job churn is people moving between employers. Attrition is people leaving the occupation altogether. Employers tend to assume attrition has risen, it noted, when a lot of what they’re seeing is churn. Churn means a competitor is hiring your people. Attrition means the trade is losing them. Different problem, different response.
The CITB profile also found that workers without post-school qualifications moved on more often, and that most people who quit a job do so before they turn 35. The same research says most people leave for a plain reason: they don’t like the job they’re in. No ERP will change that. What it will do is tell you where the exits are clustering, whether that’s one site, one role or one stage of tenure, so you’re arguing from data and not a gut feeling.
SAP treats development opportunities as a retention lever, and that only works if you can see skills in the first place. Say a trades assistant has finished three relevant courses. With that on record, you can offer a pathway before a rival offers a better job. A quick flag on the numbers: the CITB figures are from before COVID-19, so use them as a baseline and nothing more.
What to ask before choosing an ERP partner
When comparing ERP solutions, a handful of questions will tell you more than any demo.
How will the project run across time zones, and who’s on call at go-live? Can they show references in manufacturing or construction, not only professional services? Who owns cleaning up and migrating your current spreadsheets and timesheets? How do they handle licence tracking and award rules? And what’s published on pricing and timeframes, versus what’s just an estimate?
Then choose one pain point, say getting timesheets cleanly into payroll, and map it end to end before you shop. A vendor who can only talk features will struggle with that. A good partner will start asking about your rosters.
