It is certainly no surprising insight that idle periods affect the productivity of warehouse employees. Idle periods in the sense of a lack of immediately executable tasks for an employee. For loading, it is necessary that the goods are prepared and loading is released. If no such goods are available for a longer time, motivated employees will look for other productive work. But if the period is only short, work is waited for, and time is lost. Depending on the situation, this is also claimed later with the remark “The system was slow again today.”
For those who have already experienced such situations or can put themselves in such a position, here’s some good news: Such idle periods can be identified based on the data usually stored by the warehouse management system, the exact circumstances analyzed, and process improvements initiated.
The newly developed analysis tools based on the flumiq 3P model answer the following questions, among others: How much productive time is lost per day? In which process steps? What is the course within the day? What about the throughput of the earlier process steps affecting this?
It should be pointed out that the various process steps are made comparable and also aggregate-able through a consistent evaluation of the required effort. Full pallets and mixed pallets certainly have different picking efforts, but in loading, they are the same (or not). With the help of the flumiq 3P model, we find the answers in the depths of the existing data.
Interested in more details? Want a demo? Please send a short message to info@flumiq.ch