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Productivity, productivity is one of those all-encompassing words in our industry, do we really understand it? I’m Marty with Warehouse and Operations as a Career and I thought we’d talk about productivity a little today! One of our listeners is so close to getting his next level of pay or incentive, just so close. It appears his Supervisor pulled him aside last week and kind of gave him a verbal that it’s easy to see he’s working hard and doing a great job, but his numbers have to come up. I think we’d all wonder what that meant if we’d had that talk with our management. Am I going to lose any incentives, or have to step down a pay stage or am I going to lose my job even?
So, what I’ve been able to understand is this Order Selector has been working for his company for 6 weeks. His training or working with a trainer was for 2 weeks and he’s been on his own for right at 4 weeks now. Usually an order selector, at this facility, is at xxx cases per hour by the 4th week, and our gentleman is about 55 cases and hour behind that quota. He states that he’s on time every day, actually comes in about 15 minutes early for his shift and that he has not missed a single day or left early even once. His question for WAOC is how can I go faster?
Well, going faster is not necessarily how an Order Selector pulls more cases an hour. First let’s think about what 55 cases an hour is, that’s less than 1 more case per minute pulled. A minute is a long time when you actually time it out. You can walk your entire aisle in much less than a minute. Remember time is what an order selector is dealing with, not case quantities. You’ve heard a couple of our guest, selection trainers themselves, explain to us how order selection is a mental game. Of course, we have to work hard, but we have to work smart too. Across an 8 hour shift we’re going to need to pull 440 more cases, depending on where your working that could be as little as two more batches or pulls. I’m talking like that’s a simple task, I don’t mean it to sound that way, but it’s kind of that simple when we break it down. A few of the things we have to pay attention too are, lets see, anything that we allow our human nature side to take over. Maybe like running to the restroom, did we go outside of our breaktime, think about it, that’ll take us several minutes a least. We park our equipment, we’ll have to walk to the restroom or breakroom, maybe have to take off our wrist mount or speech unit, maybe our PPE’s or freezer suit and then do everything in reverse to get started again. That’s time we weren’t selecting! After our start up meeting we’re we the first one grabbing our pallets and into the aisles? Or did we talk with our friend for just a minute or two. When everyone was backed up in aisle A did, we stay focused, maybe scan through our batch and plan ahead, thinking of where we could utilize a cross aisle to reduce our travel time or did we join in on the conversation regarding someone’s weekend or evening? Remember, if we’re not selecting x number of cases a minute, we’re falling behind time wise, we never want to drive half way down an aisle without stopping to get a case. If we have one case to pull close to an end cap, and we don’t have anything else in that aisle it’s always going to be better to just hustle over and grab that case than drive all the way down an aisle and not grab any cases or just 1 case. By skipping an aisle, and planning ahead, we just saved a few minutes of our hour. Travel time is wasted time in our field, we have to save it anytime we can. Its important we plan out our moves when we’re dropping off or staging our finished batches up by the doors. We’ll need to position them correctly, especially if we’re the one responsible for wrapping them, we’ll want to be able to get in between them quickly and efficiently. We need to get right over to the pallet area, grab a new set, download our next batch and get back into the aisles as quickly as possible. All that means we don’t have time to visit with the loaders for a couple of minutes or strike up a conversation with our peers in the aisles. Honestly, the goal is not to work harder but work smarter. Use our time wisely, to earn more money, working faster at actually pulling the product is only going to cause errors, again costing us as selectors.
The definition of productivity, and yep I looked it up, is the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.
by a quick search of google.
Companies are ran off of productivity, especially in our industry. Productivity is how many of us get paid as order selectors, actually I guess we’re all paid off of productivity. A very simplistic way to say it would be that our companies have a measurable amount of work to be done and a measurable amount of money to spend on getting it done. That becomes our pay rate or hourly rate. If we can get it done quicker, meaning less expense, we’ll typically earn more. We’re venturing off into Production Pay, piece pay or Activity Based Compensation now so let me steer it back over to todays topic which is just the word productivity.
One of the greatest things about being an order selector is we come in knowing what we have to get done. Like how many cases or routes or trucks we’ll need to select for, we wrap it up and we go on home! I loved my stint as an order selector, I guess I should say my time as an order selector, and I think because it was a work alone kind of a job is why I enjoyed it so much! I mean, I could come in, focus on just my task at hand and be very successful at it. Now don’t get me wrong its hard at times to be focused and capture every possible minute and motion. But that’s what top selectors do and they earn those big bucks for it.
Every task within operations is measurable and is going to be measured. Running pallets, sanitation, driver check in, even our supervisors and management are measured by what they do. I assure you we all measured by what we do, productivity is a company wide mission.
As order selectors time is latterly money, time is what we have to stay focused on, not the quantity of cases we’re pulling. That brings up something called direct time and indirect time. We won’t go to far into these today but if your facility works with a WMS warehouse management System you may have the opportunity to sign out of production for breaks, while staging pallets, anytime you’re not pulling cases. That’s called indirect time and direct time is while your moving product. Watch out for indirect time, when your signing off or out of the system the actual clock is still ticking. There’s only 60 minutes in an hour and we’re still responsible for x number of cases being pulled at the end of the day!
There’s a few thoughts on productivity and how we can easily increase our CPMH by at least 55 cases an hour. The increase he’s reaching for is about a 20% increase in pay, well worth staying focused and working instead of visiting while he’s there. We all need down time and social time, if you plan it out at the right times it won’t affect our productivity!
I’d like to invite you to share your experiences with productivity, maybe how you’ve improved your numbers, of course you can email us at host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com or join in on the conversations using that @whseandops on facebook or twitter, we’re always on those feeds as well. I hope you enjoyed todays thoughts and that we answered the question of how do I select faster. I’d add that there’s no need to select faster, just select more! Until next week please stay focused on the task at hand and be Safe doing it!