Click Reply™ Labour Management is the suite solution that fulfils the now imperative logistics requirements of continuous improvement, process optimisation and cost reduction.
The cost of labour in a warehouse that is not highly automated accounts for a major part of the overall cost, typically ranging between 50 and 75%. Optimising process performance is therefore an important and essential lever for gaining competitiveness and reducing costs, particularly in a low margin environment.
In order to seize this opportunity and exceed the improvements that can be achieved by adopting a warehouse management system, you need a labour management product combined with a labour management program.
In order to improve, you first have to know: you can't manage what you don't know. The cornerstone of a labour management product is therefore a careful analysis of processes and of each individual activity, applying best practices and eliminating non-added value activities and actions while preserving safety and respecting deadlines. Thanks to Click Reply Labour Management, you can model the result of this detailed analysis which, closely integrated with warehouse management, automatically produces an accurate statement, in real time, of the actual time spent performing warehouse processes. The solution also allows the automatic capture from external systems, rather than direct entering into the system, of the indirect time taken by the labour force to perform all those activities which are considered to be "non-productive".
In addition to analysing the times taken by the labour force to perform activities, Click Reply™ Labour Management allows you to determine delays, advances on schedules and absences, as well as downtimes in the work shift, with instant and user-friendly functions for scheduling shifts and workers and integration with Time & Attendance systems.
With its ability to determine actual staffing requirements, the solution can alert you to any shortage or surplus of resources as the warehouse management work plan becomes known.
The purpose of a labour management programme and product is not to monitor staff but to allow them to work safely, effectively and with motivation. Knowing the outcome of activities performed is therefore essential for supervisors and workers alike, as it allows them to improve.
GUsing Click Reply™ Labour Management, you can configure in detail the theoretical times used to determine the target times for each specific job generated on the warehouse management system. The performance achieved is then calculated, in real time, considering any changes compared to the original job.
In Click Reply™ Labour Management, workers can access a private area with dashboards, graphs and summary reports containing accurate and objective information about the performance they have achieved. Similarly, supervisors have a wide range of versatile and user-friendly tools available to them to monitor process performance, shifts, periods, etc.
According to Parkinson's Law: «Work expands to fill the time available» «The more time you have available, the more it will be wasted» (essay by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, published in 1958 by London publisher John Murray) Having a challenging deadline by which to complete an activity gives you the impulse to act immediately and allows you to focus on the goal without getting distracted.
Click Reply™ Labour Management allows operators to view, in real time, the reference target time at the same time as they take charge of the activity and while it is being carried out. They can also receive push notifications about the performance levels achieved: real-time feedback, in text or figures, for an immediate assessment of their work.
The more accurate the target times communicated, the greater confidence there is in the likelihood of achieving them, and the greater the performance improvement that can be achieved. The way in which target times are determined is therefore an important contributing factor to gaining acceptance and to the results achievable by the programme.
Taking historical times as a basis, for example, will produce fewer benefits than can be achieved by using more challenging times such as Engineered Labour Standards (ELS). In addition, being able to define the routes and dimensions of your warehouse map allows you to calculate with precision the target time for the process displacement component, a component that accounts for a significant part of the overall time.