Supply chains in the U.S. have gone through dramatic shifts and businesses are quickly realizing they need to adapt to industry changes and stay ahead of the curve. Amazon’s recent $1 billion investment into warehouse technologies is a clear indication that the industry is looking towards innovative and capable solutions.
For many warehouses or distribution centers, if they are not meeting the needs of their customers or the marketplace, it can come down to having inadequate technology. As demands increase and supply chains evolve, warehouses need powerful, comprehensive and connected systems that manage the entire warehouse from end-to-end.
In the many moving parts of the warehouse, human labor is the key factor that affects productivity and order efficiency. A labor management system is designed to manage this human labor and help to make warehouses more successful and profitable.
5 labor management system benefits:
1. Greater fulfillment accuracy
Organizing warehouse labor using a management system allows businesses to assign and capture order tasks and track each stage of fulfillment. By giving the entire team visibility across fulfillment procedures and required tasks — from forklift operators to supervisors — it can help to maintain order accuracy and accountability.
Tracking the tasks and movements of warehouse employees means managers can pinpoint errors in the order process, allowing for better quality assurance and greater rates of fulfillment accuracy. Outlining and assigning order fulfillment helps to reduce human error, double-handling, wasted time, and missing things like dispatch cut-offs times.
2. Improved customer satisfaction
Fulfillment accuracy directly impacts customer satisfaction. Competition is tougher than ever, so maintaining and improving your customer satisfaction is essential to business growth and profitability.
Customers expect correct orders and fast fulfillment, anything less than that will adversely affect your customer loyalty and reputation. By collecting and tracking labor data, an LMS is able to better forecast and predict order completion so that customers receive their orders on time, no matter how busy your warehouse is. Your LMS will ensure order accuracy and efficiency at every stage, helping to provide a dependable service that customers can rely on.
3. Better employee satisfaction
Confusion, lack of direction, and a lack of accountability can lead to an unengaged and unempowered labor force. When employees have direction, transparency and fair performance targets, it enables a self-directed and satisfied workplace.
Performance targets and standards give each employee ownership and clarity on what is expected of them, as well as giving them the tools to track how they are performing against that standard throughout their day-to-day. These targets also present an opportunity to implement incentive programs, which further improve employee satisfaction and productivity.
Implementing a labor management system also increases employee retention, giving them the tools to track and evaluate their career development and plan for their future. This is particularly important with the structural shifts in the labor market that have left companies struggling to recruit and retain workers.
4. Greater productivity and efficiency
Labor is crucial to efficient operations — not only the utilization of labor, but the productivity of those labor resources. When warehouse employees are working productively and throughput is high, businesses are able to be profitable and continue to grow in a challenging marketplace. This is particularly true given that labor makes up a significant percentage of warehouse operation costs.
However, accurately analyzing and maximizing the performance of your workforce is a complex task: there are many variables involved, such as shifts in demands, types of tasks, equipment types, and location of products. This is where an LMS can help.
LMS software allows warehouses to record employee activity data from multiple sources and reports on individual and overall productivity levels. This visibility and reporting gives managers greater insights to plan the efficient utilization of labor and identify and adjust any areas that are performing inefficiently.
5. Improved management decisions
The benefit of a labor management system is that it provides real-time insights, enabling managers to transfer resources and reallocate work promptly before it impacts productivity and operations costs. This data empowers management to tighten up efficient procedures, reduce wasted time and money, and even forecast labor requirements alongside seasonal and market-wide changes.
Having a single solution that can track and report on data throughout the day gives managers and executives visibility on where their labor budgets are being spent and greater ability to optimize their human assets.
With supply chain fluctuations and ever increasing customer expectations, efficient and effective labor management is a critical part of a successful and profitable warehouse or distribution center. If one piece of your warehouse management is missing, you won’t be able to know how and where to make improvements.
Is it time to upgrade your warehouse software and make labor management more efficient and easy? Talk to our team today about how Da Vinci’s LMS module can help you.