Warehouse Labor Deployment: Just the Right People in Just the Right Places, All the Time

It’s amazing how much of labor deployment is guesswork. And most people who run business operations don’t realize how much they’re guessing until they see what it would be like to make labor deployment decisions using actual, relevant data.

That’s one of the things our AgiSight platform does for our customers.

Consider two common challenges facing warehouse operators. The first is the use of temporary labor. Warehouse operators typically have to add 50-to-100 percent of their normal staff at the busiest time of the year. But how can they know if the temporary workers they bring in are right for their particular needs – especially considering that the warehouse’s needs could vary from one day to the next?

AgiSight gives you detailed, comparative information about individual candidates who work for you, so you can better match the people to the tasks you need handled.

What should you pay temporary workers? If you pay another $1 an hour, will you get that back and then some in productivity? Most warehouse operators come up with the best guess they can based on what they see every day. If you use AgiSight, you’ll know. We’ll give you a detailed breakdown of how that extra labor spending is likely to come back to you in revenue-generating performance.

And once people have been with you for a few weeks, AgiSight will tell you how they’ve been doing with the assignments you chose for them and whether they have the potential to be good long-term employees.

Another challenge is labor planning. Warehouse operators know their workloads for a given day, but they can’t always tell from the available information if they have the right people to handle that work. AgiSight matches your priority tasks with your on-hand talent to show you how to deploy your people.

Of course, activity in a warehouse is dynamic, so the status quo of the morning may give way to very different activity in the afternoon. AgiSight shows you when you will need to redeploy people, making it possible for you and your people to be prepared for the changes and help keep your units-per-employee high.

Compare that to the more traditional scenario, in which a person receives a work order, completes the task and then just hangs around in the aisles or talks to other people because he or she has nothing to do. The old systems can’t anticipate that situation and make proactive adjustments. AgiSight does.

AgiSight can also tell the difference between today’s 2,000 units and tomorrow’s 2,000 units, letting you know that tomorrow’s are in high-pick locations that will take longer and require more people. Additionally, the platform compares the labor performance of various distribution centers in your network, so you can see how each center is doing when it comes to things like gap time, errors and overall productivity.

A uniquely holistic approach

Many software companies have tried to create labor-planning platforms to help with these issues, but they fail because they don’t see the whole picture. They may think you need double the workforce based on the time of year it is, but they don’t dig down into the orders and order profiles to protect you against bulking up your staff and falling short on revenue.

When AgiSight tells you that you need, say 26 people, and you think, “That’s an awfully precise number,” that’s because AgiSight has 26 specific people in mind and has data to show what they are likely to produce for you.

How valuable would insight like this be to you?

Many companies are trying to optimize this data by having dedicated people spend hours analyzing it. But why do that when AgiSight will do it for you instantly, and continually, so you see it right on the dashboard?

Remember, AgiSight simply brings together the data that comes from various siloed points in your system and presents it to you in a way you can use. You already have this data, but without AgiSight, you didn’t have a way to bring it all together to produce meaningful insight about your labor deployment.

AgiSight might be the best labor deployment decision you ever made. And it will certainly lead to even better ones.

Learn more about AgiSight here