Warehouses are people intensive operations.
The more activities taking place and volumes being handled determine the number of people needed.
Forecasts are usually a decent guide but largely inaccurate meaning capacity, hours in the warehouse with no demand for them, is trapped and a silent cost to the business. The other side of that coin is volumes arrive above forecast or out of sequence calling for overtime and perhaps short term agency resource.
Staff costs directly impact cashflow, people are paid weekly or monthly with PAYE costs following soon after to HMRC. Reducing people costs positively improves cashflow whilst adding enhancing the profit margin of the business.
It makes real sense to reduce and then optimise people costs in warehouses.
It’s surprising how few warehouses deploy technologies to help optimise people on the shop floor, often referred to as labour management software or LMS.
There are plenty of vendors providing time and attendance solutions (T&A) which provides the data for payroll and some essential human resource administration needs. This technology can sometimes extend to a ‘swipe to task’ capability which informs which part of the warehouse an employee is working, which is useful.
To plug the gap in terms of warehouse performance, many warehouses have a small army of clerical resources driving excel spreadsheets to create some information on productivity and numbers of hours needed and used. Whilst these teams are undoubtedly expensive as indirect costs, the information created is important for the running of the operation.
Vitesse helps on a number of levels to improve the performance of a warehouse and can answer some fundamental questions without a clerical army:
• How well utilised are our people – at an annual, all in cost of c£30,000 per employee, it is important their time is well spent. Vitesse identifies where time is lost across an entire operation and reports the loss at a granular level.
• How efficient is our operation – how are our people performing against measured targets?
Units Per Hour (UPH) doesn’t answer this question as it doesn’t capture sufficient data points for it be a fair measure of performance.
•Who are our best performing people – Vitesse will tell you your most consistent performers, wherever they are in the world. Meaning you can devise a strategy to recognise and perhaps even reward those key people.
And being accessible on mobile devices, Vitesse tells our customers the answer to these questions wherever they are in the world too!
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