There’s a tool that’s empowering warehouse managers to utilize their order fulfillment labor force with far more efficiency today than was possible in the past. It’s a tool that not only allows warehouse managers to make better decisions about workforce productivity, but that can ultimately be used to reduce a retailer’s cost-of-goods sold, while also enhancing the speed with which orders are fulfilled.
The tool is Business Intelligence (BI), and the insights gained from it are enabling MSI Automate clients to make more informed decisions when it comes to how to best utilize their fulfillment workforce.
Business Intelligence encompasses a host of tools for collecting, analyzing, and gaining actionable insights from big data. As fulfillment centers are ripe with data, especially transactional data surrounding the order fulfillment process, MSI Automate has devoted extensive resources to capitalizing on the intelligence gained from that data to empower its clients to run more efficient fulfillment operations.
The result of that effort is that MSI Automate now offers its clients access to their own customized Power BI Portal that delivers actionable business intelligence that operation managers can use for allocating resources in real-time, planning future staffing needs based on historical performance, and honing their own decision-making expertise for workforce management.
Here’s How MSI Automate’s Business Intelligence Portals Work:
The MSI Automate Power BI Portal displays a client’s key performance indicators in an intuitive, graphical manner that lets managers grasp the meaning of the data analysis in a single glance for fact-based decision making and labor planning.
The real-time and historical operational metrics captured in the portal are presented in the form of interactive, color-coded charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and heat maps.
Business intelligence reporting from MSI Automate enables granular examination of functions (in this case, pick, induct, and ship) and individuals performance in 15 minute increments.
In that the infographics are interactive, a manager needing more information can easily drill down for a deeper examination of the performance of an individual, group, function, or specific work zone.
The real-time picture of a fulfillment operation afforded by the Power BI Portal gives managers the visibility into what’s happening at any given moment, so they can change worker assignments as needed to keep pace with fluctuating production demand. The portal shows productivity rates by individual worker and worker groups, as well as providing a performance scorecard for work area activities. Because the level of operational detail provided by Power BI is so detailed, a manager can see problems before they develop, such as aging orders or workflow congestion, and take appropriate action, such a reassigning a worker or workers to another task or warehouse area.
The portal can also replay the past day’s operation, providing a minute-by-minute visual of what took place in the fulfillment operation with the same action sequence of warehouse activity and accompanying metrics that a manager would have seen when watching a live screen. This unique playback feature allows managers to re-examine the decisions they made and consider whether other alternatives might have worked out better.
A Tool to Control Costs and Enhance Performance
An MSI Automate Labor Management BI screen showing productivity rates for functions and users over a selected time period. Performance by individual workers can be examined in comparison to the entire labor force.
By providing a detailed historical analysis of the labor in a client’s fulfillment operation, MSI Automate’s Power BI takes the guesswork out of planning staffing levels. Managers can forecast labor requirements based on order volumes and previous productivity rates to ensure adequate staffing levels during the week, on daily shifts, or by function to maintain critical order throughput.
In using MSI Automate’s BI analysis to calculate staffing levels, companies can achieve a balance between too many and too few workers and subsequently control labor costs without sacrificing fulfillment performance.
Power BI’s playback capability provides a self-teaching mechanism for managers to get better at decision making. Just as coaches watch game films to review their coaching decisions, operation managers can watch a replay of the day’s fulfillment operation to go back over their decisions and find overlooked alternatives. Studying the replay makes it possible for managers to acquire additional insights into workforce direction or resource planning to improve labor productivity.
With ever increasing e-commerce competition in the omnichannel marketplace, controlling fulfillment costs, aka the cost of goods sold, is now more critical than ever. By enabling our clients to boost productivity through smarter utilization of current warehouse employees, MSI Automate’s Business Intelligence tools are empowering MSI Automate clients to fill orders faster and at the lowest possible unit costs — and, as a result, boost their strategic edge over the competition.
Walter High is VP Marketing at MSI Automate, where he has worked since 2012.