Units per hour, or UPH, is a metric found in almost all warehouses.
It’s a simple calculation of hours used divided by volume moved – it is a measure of output.
UPH works as a target for employees in a production environment where there’s a standard task and no variables.
Warehouses every day carry out tasks with variables. Think of order picking in a conventional manually operated warehouse – locations visited, units picked, distances travelled will change by task.
It goes then that UPH as a target or measure of performance in a warehouse is inaccurate heading towards being pretty unfair.
In our experience, travel alone makes up about 50% of the time taken to pick orders – 50% as a variable is a very significant contributor to the time a task will take to complete.
Employees should be measured on their efficiency – how much time should a task have taken versus how long it actually took – there’s nothing fairer than that.
Labour Management software tools, often referred to as LMS like Vitesse, bring a rigour to the running of a warehouse.
XYZ maps are essential to compute travel distances and this is a key component of an LMS.
There’s another part of running warehouses that impacts UPH reporting and that’s lost and unaccounted for time. Again, our experience tells us there can be as much as 40 minutes per employee per day lost here. At £15 per hour, recovering 20 minutes is worth £5 per day per employee – we will leave the reader to do quick maths and work out what that means for their warehouse.
If there are 40 minutes being lost per employee per day and UPH productivity targets are being used then in perpetuity those minutes will continue to be trapped inside the the UPH target thus wasted. It’s an amazing reality to think that’s how blind the warehouse operator is when relying on UPH.
Truth be told, managing people on a UPH premise is out of date and in particular large warehouse operators should consider LMS as part of their operational toolkit.
Why is it that the majority of warehouses deploy UPH as an individual performance metric?
Why is UPH used to report in the performance of a warehouse?
There are a coupe of obvious reasons.
In the first instance it will be because ‘it’s easy’ and ‘we’ve always done it this way’ so perhaps the warehouse industry is behind the curve.
It might be because there’s not seen to be a viable alternative – labour management tools are not common place and could suffer from a perception of being expensive or not user friendly.
Vitesse is changing things.
Vitesse can be implemented in 7 weeks time – customers will see for themselves how well run their warehouse is and where opportunities lie for improvement.
Employees will be glad to see Vitesse too!
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