Use your existing T&A System to Track Productivity
How well does your Distribution Center track its productivity? If you do not have a Warehouse Management System (WMS) and are tracking productivity manually or on spreadsheets, consider modifying your existing Time and Attendance System (T&A) to deliver productivity reporting.
Time and Attendance systems typically use a proximity card that is ‘read’ by a card-reading unit. Each employee is assigned a card that identifies them and is used by the Payroll Department to track their hours worked during the week in the facility. It is an accurate method of tracking as the system also tracks vacation, sick leave, overtime and holiday hours. Payroll activities are often batched before payday and the system generates a variety of useful reports.
It is often beneficial to have more than one ‘card reader’ in the facility to track hours by department as opposed by the total facility. This enables the facility to track productivity by department for functions such as Receiving, Put-way, Replenishment, Picking, Checking, Packing and Shipping.
Here is how the process would work: A Receiving employee would ‘swipe’ the general ‘Receiving’ card (always available by the card-reading unit in the Receiving area), followed by their own employee card. This will assign all working hours by that employee to the Receiving Department. Should this employee move to Picking later in their shift, they would swipe the “Picking’ card in the picking area, etc. This process enables the warehouse to accurately track labor hours by department throughout the facility.
A simple modification would enable the T&A system to track unit volumes processed in each department. For example, the number of cases/pallets received, the number of cases/units picked, etc. This information would be manually entered by the Supervisor in each department at the end of the shift. The source of the information would be from the sales/order management system or any other system that is used by the warehouse.
The benefits of using your existing T&A system for productivity reporting are:
- Leverage use of existing system already in place
- Accurate and timely reporting
- Reports used to build future budget forecasts
- Use reports to develop team incentive programs by department
- Resulting benefits of tracking productivity exceed T&A system modification costs
Once the basic process is in place, future modifications may be made to the reporting as required. For example, comparisons may be made to the previous week, month & year and variances may be calculated by volume or percentage. After a few weeks of running reports and gaining a level of confidence with the results, you may then want to tie in an incentive program to reward team performance. This will result in greater productivity improvements in your warehouse.