The Progress Group : Crowd Engineering

TPG’s Warehouse Improvement Program (WIP)

There is no silver bullet or single methodology for warehouse performance improvement or workforce management, but TPG has had a great deal of success using our WIP program at a variety of different distribution and manufacturing sites. Based on past client results, we confidently tell prospects that the WIP process consistently generates 10 to 30% improvement in labor productivity. The following paragraphs provide a little insight into just how it works.

Measure First

Our WIP methodology begins with instituting some basic measures of productivity. This is done not so much to influence the pace of the workforce as much as it is to understand the issues that influence consistent, good productivity.

We have found that unless equipment works 99%+ of the time, associates are given similar work to do, managers oversee the work force similarly, and software performs as expected, it’s almost impossible to expect workers to perform consistently. In facilities with these kinds of problems you cannot get buy in into the standards and they don’t result in much improvement.

We use rough labor standards at this stage to uncover and then fix many of these issues FIRST; we use poor performance not to counsel the workers as much as to highlight general process problems. Once we have remedied some of these, we will then suggest clients lightly enforce the standard to get the workforce used to being measured, but we don’t push for tight management by these standards because a) the standards usually need to be refined and b) we need to teach the operators how to achieve them.

How can you hold someone accountable for the

picking standard if the item is not there to pick?

Crowd Engineering

A key differentiator of TPG’s approach to performance improvement is our emphasis on teaching associates HOW to achieve the standards that we develop. In some environments, operators are left to themselves to make the numbers, but we believe strongly that methods account for a majority of the savings associated with such programs, so we invest a lot in understanding what an operator needs to do and then teaching it to them.

We have pioneered what we believe is the most innovative and employee friendly technique for uncovering and then teaching best methods in logistics. We have christened the proprietary software and methodology we use Crowd Engineering because it relies heavily on associates to teach us unknowingly the best ways to do a job. To learn more about Crowd Engineering click here.

Managing By the Numbers

Once the operators have been taught to perform a given job efficiently and accurate measures of their performance are in place, a client will frequently discover that the operators are efficient when they work, but for a bunch of different reasons they are not working all the time. Probably the biggest unanticipated benefit (discovery?) associated with these programs is clarifying just how much supervisors can influence costs. In many sites the variance in how supervisors do their jobs is responsible for more productivity losses/gains than how the floor associates do theirs.

What makes this discovery disturbing to many firms, is they usually have very few tools in place to manage supervisor results on a day by day basis. Even companies that have metrics find they are too high level or they do not reflect the content of the work on a wave by wave or shift by shift basis, so they are not “enforceable”. At this stage of a site’s WIP-journey, TPG will help the client build metrics that make fair judgments of supervisor performance -comparing daily departmental results to the budget for the mix of work performed.

Then TPG will train the supervisor in what really matters as far as ensuring consistent, good productivity results from his or her department. At one site, our training focused on educating supervisors how to plan the # of people needed to come in each day. At another it was how to schedule the personnel into the most efficient pick teams each day. At yet another it was the importance of watching replenishments to make sure that all the replens were done in an area before the supervisor switched the pickers into that zone.

You can’t stop once you are measuring just the

workers. You need to measure supervisors too.

We have found that a clear way to motivate great performance is to produce a report that compares the day’s performance of the supervisor’s team against the best productivity they have ever achieved on work of a similar nature. The report associates a $ cost or $ savings associated with the gap. In this way you can greatly reduce the cost of supervisory mistakes because they are finally out in the open. Once this happens the supervisors almost always respond. Budgets are adhered to and shareholders and associates are pleased with the results.

Conclusion

TPG’s WIP program consistently saves 10 to 30% at every place it is deployed. It works so well because of three reasons. First, it focuses on establishing a reliable process that can foster a culture of accountability. Second, it emphasizes the importance that good practices have on both associate and supervisor performance. Finally, it relies on tools that reveal efficient techniques that are nearly invisible to the unaided human eye.

To discuss how this might be used in your operation, please contact Steve Mulaik at smulaik@theprogressgroup.com or dial 770 329 5675.

The Progress Group (www.theprogressgroup.com) is a logistics consulting firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. We specialize in logistics thought leadership. For more information about Crowd Engineering, please contact Steve Mulaik at +1 770 329 5675 or email him at smulaik@theprogressgroup.com.