Coordinating schedules and managing your workforce are among the most basic responsibilities of running your distribution center. After all, if there’s no one there to load, unload, pick and ship, work comes to a standstill. Beyond that, you measure employee performance to determine if operational goals are being met—and when they aren’t, you refine processes to make improvements.

But it’s very possible that poor productivity isn’t being caused by your processes. It’s because the right people aren’t being assigned to the tasks at hand. When assigning work to employees, there is more to consider than each employee’s particular strengths and weaknesses. There are a myriad of other key personnel and operational factors that impact cost and efficiency and they need to be taken into account as well. That way labor schedules can be optimized at the very beginning of a job rather than assigning personnel based on intuition and then hoping for the best when job performance is measured upon completion.

80 Million Variables

Job assignments are usually based on personal experience with your workforce and how much manpower is required to tackle a given workload. But in order to bring the job in at the lowest possible cost, it is essential to factor in elements like seniority, cost, qualifications and individual past performance when assigning employee tasks.

You may be surprised to learn, however, that in a typical DC, there can be up to 80 million personnel and operational variables that affect planning job assignments for the typical distribution center’s workloads, service level commitments and costs.

Labor Schedule Optimization Produces Real Results For the Bottom Line

In order to effectively reduce costs and streamline operations, you need a solution, like Manhattan Associates SCOPE® Labor Scheduling Optimization™ that optimizes distribution center labor by comparing available employees against user-defined constraints. The person with the right skills is then matched to job requirements across the entire enterprise—not just within operational silos.

Experienced, knowledgeable supervisors can, in fact, create effective schedules that are 90 percent to 96 percent accurate in addressing facility needs and service level commitments. However, labor costs make up a full 50 percent of distribution center operating expenses—and being off the mark by six percent in a facility with an annual payroll of $10 million means $600,000 in unnecessary expenses. Even with the help of simple labor management software, it is virtually impossible using manual calculations and spreadsheets to address all the factors that could turn those expenses into a six percent savings.

A labor schedule optimization solution, however, can capture that six percent and more by examining all factors on an enterprise-wide level, which include pay rates, historical performance, historical throughput and future volume rates.