SUPPLY CHAIN STANDARD JULY/AUGUST 2009
www.supplychainstandard.com
demand due to the weather.”
The biggest challenge is getting your business forecasting
as close to reality as you can. Everything is subject to
volatility, but the best businesses are those that place great
emphasis on providing accurate forecasts at a corporate
level that can then be adjusted to a local logistics
environment. Willoughby believes that the businesses that
look at their forecasts three months out and then review
them a month out, two weeks out and finally a week out
from when they will be delivering the volume through the
operation are the ones that are able to plan their labour
the best and drive out cost.
However,hesaysitisalsoeasytogotheotherway.
“If your forecasts are under the actual
requirements, you might not be able to
get hold of temporary labour in a
hurry,” he says. Most big logistics
operations will have tie-in
arrangements with local
agencies that are able to provide
short-term labour. Efficient
businesses will train people
from specific agencies so that
when they are brought in at
short notice they are well
equipped with an
understanding of
what the role will
be, and that
they will have been trained with
all the appropriate equipment.”
Bigger businesses that have
numerous operations may
run national pooling
operations and will balance
labour between different sites,
sending staff on minivans to
locations as required.
According to Willoughby,
collaboration between local noncompeting
companies works well
in the transport field where fleet
and driver labour pools can be
used effectively. “It’s a harder
challenge if you have
SCS:MANAGING LABOUR RESOURCES 15
in a downturn
I’ve seen some businesses where the
work pattern is so biased to one end
of the year, particularly around
Christmas, that annualised hours are
hard to achieve. It’s all about the
specific challenges of the operation.
warehousing operations that might be in a similar area to
work out a balancing programme between the two sites unless
there is a neutral third party such as a 3PL that can coordinate
between the two and can work out who picks up the
cost one week and who picks it up the following week.”
There is no right or wrong answer with regard to bonuses.
“The generally held view is that a good well-motivated team,
with a good basic salary, can achieve every bit as much as a
team that has a lesser basic salary but is bonus driven. In fact,
they may be focused on the bonus rather than quality or
accuracy and that’s why many companies are now setting
bonuses based on pick accuracy rather than volume,” he says.
Technology too can play an important part in planning and
co-ordinating labour resources to meet
patterns of demand. Oxford
University Press has cut its order
fulfilment costs by 27 per cent after
installing a RedPrairie workforce
management system at its UK warehouse.
The publishing house says it achieved a 19 per
cent increase in order throughput in the first week
of implementing the system, and after a year saw the
cost of fulfilling an order fall by 27 per cent. That is
shaving £100,000 off its annual budget for warehouse
staff as it can now handle orders during peak periods
using less resource.
Catalyst
Elwyn Roberts, OUP infrastructure manager, says: “The key
to successfully implementing the system was to involve staff
fully in the project. We gave them ownership of their
productivity and the chance to contribute ideas so that all
the changes made were their own. This proved to be a
catalyst to re-energise the team and showed them a wealth of
new opportunities.”
Manhattan Associates has just released Labour Schedule
Optimisation, which analyses and calculates numerous labour
factors such as number of workers, skill levels, individual
performance levels, length of shifts, overall workload, break
times and hourly rates.
Manhattan claims the new system creates savings of six to
nine per cent, which it says is in addition to the 15 to 20 per
cent savings created by implementing its core labour
management solution.
To view a Ceros magazine you need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser and have the flash player 8 or higher installed. To install the latest flash player, click the icon above, install the flash plugin and then click here to refresh this page.