Warehouse Workforce Management Systems - Labor Management Systems - An overview

Warehouse Labor management is to deal with efficient planning, measuring and tracking of various activities that are executed in a warehouse. The features of a good labor management system can be classified into five key areas as depicted below.

Assignments & Adjustments:

An assignment is a piece of work which can be measured and tracked. For example, moving a pallet from one location to other location is an assignment. Usually goal time (expected time) for each such assignment are identified and configured in the Labor management system. When the warehouse personnel execute such a task, the productivity against the expected goal time is tracked on a real time basis. Various performance management reports can be generated using this measurement. Having the right goal time is the key to the success of such measuring and tracking of assignments.

An adjustment to the assignment can be an ancillary task for which goal time cannot be set. For example, a picker doing stacking and arranging of goods in staging lane after depositing the goods is an adjustment work. Time taken for such activities is captured and accounted against that particular employees performance records.

Time and Attendance:

Usually workforce management systems are integrated with clocks through which the punch in and punch out times are captured and transmitted to the workforce management systems. Break punches are also captured for accurate measurement of working time based on which wages can be applied.

Scheduling & Shifts:

When it comes to planning the tasks, scheduling plays a vital role. It is usually done on a weekly basis. For every week, the planning is performed and shifts are determined. Working hours along with overtime works are also planned using scheduling utility. On each day how many shifts are going to be performed and who is going to work in which shift are well planned and are configured. Visibility on who is scheduled on what day and who are the remaining unscheduled users is gained by this utility.

Payroll:

Wages and performance based incentives are calculated per pay period in a scientific way while using workforce management tools. This helps in employee morale boost and retaining the high performing individuals through incentive systems. While generating the payroll the following attributes are considered

• Clock in and clock out timings
• Performance against set goal time
• Overtime works
• Non work time (paid) like holidays and vacation pay
• Adjustments to the regular wages

Dashboards and Reports:

Real time visibility on productivity of each employee is available in the warehouse workforce management tools. Mobility of the supervisors and the managers are ensured through handheld device dashboards and reports. Rank order of employees based on performance and observation of abnormal performances can be executed using the utilities.

In today’s world of mobility and big data, the necessity of a good workforce management system is much felt and are used in a most productive way in many organizations.

Storage Assignment Strategies

WMS Tasks optimisation - A turn around examination

A task is a work request for the warehouse personnel, say for example a putaway or picking task. In the beginning users were doing undirected tasks meaning tasks are not assigned to any resource. Resource themselves choose some tasks based on their own assumptions and preferences. Later directed task concept came into place where in supervisors assigned tasks to respective personnel. Managing tasks efficiently can reduce warehousing expenses to large extent. This has lead to innovations in task management like prioritising the tasks based on the business criticality. For example picking task is preferred over putaway task and replenishment task is preferred over picking task. The time lapse from the generation of the task also is taken into account later. The older the task the higher the priority of the task to be executed. Still the tasks are not optimised and the warehouse personnel tend to roam meaninglessly for longer distances. Then came in the concept of task interleaving. A good example of task interleaving is doing a putaway task on the way to pick products for shipping. This reduces empty runs (movements).

Task interleaving is characterised by 3 principles - driven by priority and proximity and constrained by permissions / authorisations / access capabilities.
Priority; Each task type is identified and are assigned priority for each task type. This is termed as absolute priority. Later the element of time lapse came in and a delta priority for interval of time is defined. Priority keeps on increasing as time lapses.
Proximity; The distance from the personnel position. This eliminates empty moves.
Permissions; Certain zones or areas inside the warehouse may be secured and only authorised personnel came move in there. The other criterion might be only authorized vehicle types can move in a zone. The locations may be multilevel and for lower access levels hand jockey can be used where for higher access levels we might need to have specialized material handling equipments.