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Warehouse and operations as a career, I’m Marty and We all here at WAOC appreciate you stopping in with us again. If you haven’t subscribed just yet or maybe left a kind review of the show, we’d appreciate that as well. And I’m sure your friends would love to know where your getting all these thoughts and opinions from, feel free to send them over our way.
I’d like to start off today talking about waste. The subject of waste came up twice this week. Once from a young supervisor that’d just gotten out of a budget meeting where his CFO had used the word waste on several different occasions, while glaring at him, as he put it. Then the next day I had an order selector and one of his buddies who operated a reach lift approach me, asking about waste. They had heard the term applied to their productivity measurements and wanted to know what that meant. So waste is a good place to start today maybe!
Waste is an overused term in the distribution industry. I’ll share a few situations where I’ve had waste thrown out at me and where I’ve tossed it on to others.
As an outbound lead or supervisor, we may be in charge of or responsible for all the shrink wrap, nylon strapping tape, and label rolls, right? How many times have you seen, and order selectors are notorious for all three of these, an 80% used roll of shrink wrap tossed over to the side because an order selector of course did not want to run out while wrapping a pallet so he or she tosses it aside and runs off with a new roll? And nylon tape, on one shift I have seen literally 100 partially used rolls laying around everywhere. There small, lightweight, and an item we always have to have with us. And have you ever been walking your dock and see those pallets where a bored selector or loader has used like 3 rolls of tape instead of shrink wrap? And I’ll deny ever saying this, and I hope the statute of limitations has expired, but I was once a party to shrink wrapping and taping an inventory control guy to a bollard post.
If your facility uses the belt label printers, you know those small thermal labels. They come on a cardboard roll. The ones I used to buy were 500 to a roll. Our average batch or pull was about 180 to 200 cases. My selectors hated to run out of labels during a pull, having to stop in an aisle and reload their machine and then reset it to where they were in their batch. We’d find many, many, 80% rolls everywhere. I understood it, but the cost of and expense to our departments for these three items is immense.
And how about pallets? A wooden, GMA oak pallet can run anywhere from $8 to $18 a piece depending on its grade and age. As a supervisor how many times have you cringed or lost it when you hear that cracking sound a pallet jack load riser makes as it’s separating the slats and runners on a pallet. If the operator keeps going and doesn’t stop you know you’ve just spent that cost. I had an employee tell me one time, it’s ok, you can send it out for repair! I informed him we paid for the repaired pallet when we bought it back!
Ever had your power go down during a selection shift? One of our rules was that during a power outage everyone had to grab a broom or a rag and start sweeping or dusting the racking. It was considered a waste of labor if we weren’t doing something. Mind you it was too dark to select , however we could sweep and dust. Actually, the no selecting rule was a good one, it was too dark to safely be operating the equipment but still!
As a supervisor we’ll probably be responsible for the man hours we use each shift. Now although this number is relatively easy to determine, I mean all we need to know is the case count divided by our hourly selection rate or average and we’ll know how many man hours we’ll need right? However, what about all those variables. People calling in sick, calling in with transportation issues or just not coming in? Yep, your still responsible. And if you are over staffed, you guessed it, your boss is going to say you’re creating a waste with labor!
And for us employees or order selectors. Waste can take on a whole other meaning. It can affect our income, our positions even and promotions on down the road. We do not want to be that employee that is always tossing those almost empty rolls of shrink wrap to the side, or the one over wrapping our pallets and wasting the shrink wrap. I’ve actually seen selectors doing this, just to take them a few more minutes so they could pick up another batch, a more prosperous batch, that they knew was coming up. And all those partial nylon tape rolls. One night I had the inventory control guys gather up all the rolls they ran across and place them in a box. I locked up all the unopened cases. We had to use up all the partial rolls before we could get into the new ones. I’m sure some of them were just thrown away but we worked two shifts without using any new rolls. That saved about 1 case and a half! And the crew did a much better job with them for quite a while!
And labels, those labels cost a lot of money. I stayed on the carpet about labels. It got so bad at one point that a selector had to turn in an empty cardboard roll to get another one. Again, after a while, people got much more responsible with them.
I kind of got off the employees’ role didn’t I, we’ll I guess not really.
Anyway, so as an order selector we may be working by the case, or on an incentive program, or some type of an activity based compensation plan. With these pay platforms we do not want to produce any wasted movements. Excess drive time is a waste. Taking that extra restroom break becomes a waste. Leaving to lunch a minute early or returning a minute late is a waste to us. Waste to an order selector is lost money. A successful order selector learns that early.
But what about planning out retrieving our pallets for the next batch? Or pre planning where we’ll stage our pallets once we get them back up on the front docks? Maybe having a system for downloading or picking up our next batch? All these movements are just as important as our drive times and are wasted motions if we do not plan for them.
Using the logic, we just learned about company’s waste and our waste did we pick up on the fact that waste is expense, it is money. And I don’t know about you but I’m just not big on losing money.
With all that said, think of all the other ways we create waste in our industry.
Damages, short on truck, misships, salvage, returns, and we’ve mentioned breaking pallets but what about all the pallets we shipped off instead of restacking when loading them out or maybe leaving the wrong count on the trailer. Oh, speaking of leaving things on trailers, on the inbound side, and we haven’t even talked about wrong counts being received, and wrong items being received. I could go on and on but I think you get the idea.
So yes, the word waste is used a lot, but is it overused? Maybe not! As professionals I hope we do understand and take responsibility for that word. It is our responsibility as an employee.
I mentioned last week , lets see what week was it, week, week 34, so were in week 35 this week. So, we’re closing in on the end of the 3rd quarter. How are we coming along with our planning and goals? Many of us had a rough 2nd and maybe even a 3rd quarter this year. But it’ll be ok. Things are moving right along. I’m thinking the 4th quarter, that distribution, Manfacturing, and production rush is going to be a bit different this year but then It’ll all start over, much stronger at the end of the 4th.
I feel now is the time to make those final adjustments to our goals for 2020. What we can’t or didn’t achieve on time this year, kick on down the road, that’s fine, it’s called adjusting. I’m doing quite a bit of adjusting myself!
I had a long-time listener reach out and ask why I hadn’t done an episode about how to journal, plan and create goals. He’d taken one of my other classes on-line and thought it’d be a great episode for our listeners. I’d certainly be happy to put such together, if you’d like to see something like that, especially if you’re a new supervisor or lead, or maybe an order selector, lift operator, sanitation or transportation associate, shoot any type of warehouse employee let me know, we’ll put something together, or even another type of topic. Send us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com. I love talking Op’s, your topics or mine!
Until next week, watch waste, especially our waste, that’s our money. And be always be safe, as not being safe is the biggest waste we’ll encounter!