Earning More In The Aisles

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We all work to pay our bills and provide a better living for our families.  Some of us, I hope most of us, are fortunate enough to enjoy our jobs so much that it isn’t work at all.  I’m Marty with Warehouse and Operations as a Career and today I’d like to start off with a question from a gentleman here locally.

You know, we’re often taught and trained how to do our jobs, we’re given all the standard operating procedures, step by step, how to do the task along with all the preferred work methods but maybe we, as managers, or our managers, forget to explain more to the individual aspect of the position.  The question was posed “I’m working a lot harder than a guy named Mike yet he always gets more cases than I do.  Can you tell me how to scam like he does.  We get our pulls from our wrist computer, I can’t figure out how he always gets better pulls.”  Well, it sounds like your facility is using a selection system through their WMS.  If there’s more than just you 2 selecting there’s not much of a chance that he’s scamming the system.  Batches or pulls are downloaded from a que, next selector up gets the batch downloaded to their wrist mount.

When productivity or activity-based pay, even incentive pay programs arrived on the scene they actually disrupted the old “this is only what I need to do mentality”.  Now we could work harder than someone next to us and we may earn more pay. But if we work smarter than the person next to us, we will earn more pay. In the world of productivity pay it is not about working hard.  It’s all about the clock.

Everyone knows about direct time and indirect time right?  Direct time is time handling cases or moving freight. Indirect time is time spent in the restroom, washing our hands, getting our equipment signed out, anything other than handling cases while we are on the clock.  Your company may operate on KPI’s or key performance indicators.  In your position those measurements could be cases per hour selected or pallets per hour that’s putaway or replenished.  A cycle counter may have to count x number of cases an hour and make x number of adjustments.   Anything can be measured.  Lets go back to the selector.  We can know, on average, how many pallets we will load with product and how many drops we will make at the staging area in a given shift.  We can determine that because  we know how many cases are on an average batch and how much cube we’re selecting.  If our WMS is set to say 55 cube, math will tell us the number of pallets we’ll load and how many trips we’ll make to the staging area or doors to be loaded out.

Those standards are determined by measuring everything we will be doing for any given task.  Lets stick with selection for a moment.  Your larger distribution centers may have an engineering company to come in and assign engineered standards to every part of our task.  Everything will be measured.  How many inches it is from dock door number one to the last slot of our pick paths.  And between each aisle, each bay and each slot even.  That’ll be done for each dock door as well.  With the entire warehouse now measured they would time how long it takes to drive our pallet jack to each slot and each area within those paths.  How long it takes our forklifts to raise to the second level, the third level, the fourth level and so on.  Now they can work the math against the average batches or pulls and determine what the anticipated standard should be.  Yes, it’s complicated, a lot of math and a wealth of information is gathered.  But for us as employees, well, we can use all that to our advantage in an activity based system.  All we have to do is work the system like it was designed.

OK, I talked about not working harder but working smarter. Remember, those engineers designed the system and put reasonable numbers in place for an 8 hour shift.  They came up with, lets say, 170 cases an hour would equal 100%.  The average experienced selector will pull 170 cases an hour.  They have added all our human traits in, saying hi to each other, bathroom breaks, maybe slowly separating our pallets for the next batch, going to breaks early and returning a little late.  They knew that we were going to stop in the aisles and talk for a minute about our weekend plans.  All that is figured on us being the average employee. All we have to do is not be that average employee.  And that’s exactly how we work less by thinking more.  Maybe I should say focusing more.

I had this friend once, I don’t guess I ever knew his real name, we called him dupee.  Dupee always, and I mean every signal night ended up with more cases pulled than I did. I don’t mean occasionally, I mean for 3 years I never beat him case wise.  I’d pass him up in an aisle and the next thing I’d know was I was passing him again in another aisle.  I’d never see him catch up to me, yet, their’d I be passing him again?  We always joked about it, actually, I always accused him of scamming or cheating, not so much joking.  Years later the light bulb went off in my head.  Dupee wasn’t wasting time driving down aisles he didn’t have a pick in.  He’d skip sometimes like 5 aisles and back track, running his path the most efficient route possible, hence why I’d pass him like 3 times in the same hour.  Dupee came in, signed out for his equipment, grabbed his pallets and stayed focused on his task at hand.  He never stopped and joked with us or complained about anybody, shoot, I don’t even know what he did on the weekends because he never brought it up!  He’d be on his equipment when break time arrived and be back on it the minute break was over.  Now, Dupee loved lunch time.  He’d talk with us and joke around then but he never hung around after the bell.  Dupee was just working the system.  Every minute the machine was counting him as working or direct time, he had a case in his hands.  He only stopped handling cases during scheduled indirect time.  He was working 20% less than me and getting 20% more credit for it!  Like I said, I figured it out.  Took me three years, but I’m a slow learner.  Over the next 3 years we were the top performers in the aisles.  Once I learned how to stay focused I actually had more fun pulling.  It became a game to maneuver the aisles and beat the system.

So to answer the question, your fellow employee Mike probably isn’t scamming the system.  That’d be hard to do in this day and age.  He’s just working it, as it was designed.  Watch him this week, closely, and I bet next week you’ll be out pulling him!

We just walked through how an order selector can work the system but the exact same holds true for any direct positions.  Even non-productivity positions can perform better by staying focused and, well, working like we’re being paid for!  A couple of weeks ago I had a young gentleman tell me it was his right to talk to people.  He’d been coached about spending too much time conversing with others on the front docks.  His supervisor had told him he wasn’t in high school any more, we weren’t here to socialize, we’re here to work and for him to get busy.  Now I think the supervisor could have handled it a little better, but you’d have to agree he was on point.  We’re being paid to do a job and we should just get it done.  I’ve been watching the employee for a couple of months now, he’ll make a top producer one day.  He’s already one of the better than average unloaders.  He’s working the numbers.  Once he figures out to stay focused he’s going to be one of the top earners!

I do a lot of talking about having a plan and a goal here at WAOC.  Things like what we talked about today is a plan and a goal.  The gentleman that presented the question has a plan, he is going to out pull Mike.  His goal is to be a top selector.  Once we’ve identified our goal it’s easy to develop our plan and easy to achieve it!

So on that note we’ll wrap up another episode!  If your enjoying the show please subscribe and maybe tell a good friend about it!  And remember we can be found on Facebook and Twitter using @whseandops and one of my favorite groups is the warehouse equipment operator’s community on Facebook as well.

Stay strong and stay Safe in our personal lives and our work environments!

Revisit The EPJ – vs – Shrink Wrap

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Hello everyone, Marty T Hawkins here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career.  I want to sincerely thank you for checking in with us each week and I hope we mention something that will affect your career in some kind of positive way here today!  

I want to share something real quick.  I went to the grocery store today, a national chain, it’s close, convenient and frankly just easy for me to get in and out.  I’m not a big shopper.  I know what I want, I get it and get gone. Today I was the only person in line at lane 5.  The cashier was a gentleman that I’d learn in a bit had just turned 20 years old.  Now I often will hand out or leave behind a WAOC card or maybe even one of my distribution training center business cards if I’m somewhere local, and today, after paying I handed him a WAOC card and told him if he was ever interested in securing a job in the warehousing or transportation fields to send me an email, that I could probably help him out.   

No one else was in line so he took a minute to ask a few questions, and the conversation went something like this: 

Could I make more money in a warehouse? 

I told him probably and gave him the starting wage for a few entry level G/L positions I am presently working on with Belmar Integrated Logistics in Dallas.  

He stated that was a couple of dollars more an hour than he was earning now. I could tell that he was intrigued and wanted more information. 

I told him that all those positions would be full time and at least 40 hours a week with a couple of them providing maybe 50 to 55 hours a week.  Now I was thinking that would be the icing on the cake right?  A full-time position with some over time guaranteed! 

Well, he immediately, and I mean without hesitation let me know that he couldn’t work more than 25 to 30 hours a week.  That he only worked days and preferred something after 10 am.  Maybe 5 to 6 hours a day. 

I ask why those kinds of hours, was he going to school or maybe taking care of a family member or something.  He stated no, he didn’t need to make more than that and he needed his time off or what he called my chill time! 

Being me, I asked what was his plans for retirement?  Didn’t he want things?  He said he needed to be a kid first.  I’m only 20 years old.   

I thanked him and went on to my car! Having a WAOC card still in my hand I noticed a young man gathering up empty grocery carts in the parking lot, so I handed him the card and told him if he was ever interested in a warehouse position to give me a shout.  He said thanks but no thanks man, my brother works in a warehouse and that is some hard work, I don’t have to work that hard here.   

I took my card back and went to the car. I’m still shaking my head a little, but you know what, that may work for them.  They may have a better plan figured out.  Whither they do or don’t I honestly do wish them the best of luck and an amazing life.   

So lets talk some op’s.  To all the electric pallet jack operators out there, especially the rider jack operators.  Did you check your drive wheel and your load wheels today?  I mean really give them a good look over!  Both are on your pre-shift equipment report right? 

I was cruising YouTube today for a clip of stretch wrap being caught up in our wheels and ran across a short video that was caught by a security camera of a drive wheel literally falling apart while an operator was in forward motion.  Needless to say, the machine came to an immediate stop, and he was thrown about 6 feet forward.  Luckly he wasn’t hurt.  It showed him and a fellow worker picking up chunks of the wheel from under the jack.   

It made me think, If I am going to be honest here I have to admit that I do not always back way up and check that my drive wheel doesn’t have cracks running across or around it everyday.  I know, I should but, well, it is not something that happens all the time.   

I began to wonder how often it does happen, so I reached out to two different pallet jack mechanics I know for some advice.  They said that a catastrophic wheel failure like that hardly ever happens.  They both felt like a regular preventive maintenance or PM check may have caught it and had the gentleman backed up, bent over and checked the wheel that he would have seen the cracks.  They both felt like the incident was preventable.  

I reached out to the video channel, but I haven’t heard back from them yet.  I wanted to ask him if he ever checked the drive wheel before and if he would be checking it more going forward!  Do you check your drive wheels, I mean other than checking for chunks missing by rolling it forward and backward.  Honestly, before today, that’s about all I did.  but after seeing that film today, I’m going to be checking that wheel out a lot more often! Send us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and share your thoughts with the group, what are you going to do, will you be adding that point to your daily pre-trip? 

Anyway, so the reason I was looking for a video about shrink wrap getting wrapped around our load wheels was that I had a student going over to a place, a facility, that I knew always had, let’s say, opportunities with excess wrap being everywhere on the floor.  The culture there is if it’s in the way run over it!  I was explaining the additional expense wrap spun up in our wheels and mounts cost and the dangers it presents to us as operators if we don’t take proper care of our equipment and I wanted to show him some footage of such.  I found some really good ones, a few where the mechanics were showing us how much damage is caused to the bearings and even our hydraulic systems and lifting mechanisms. I think he was quite stunned.  

Now our load wheels are easy to check out, I do check them out every day before climbing onto my jack! Do you?   

So, I know the maintenance guys at this facility, they’ve been sharing with me for months how many load wheels are replaced, and I got to thinking.  Ok, we all know it’s a culture problem.  No one brings it up, so the shift just continues to run over the shrink wrap.  So, what if a new boot, a new hire eased into it.  Brought it up to the supervisor ever so often.  Maybe with a little coaching, he could get noticed in a good way.  Who know he could bring about some change.  Maybe even get recognized as helping to reduce expenses and improving productivity.  Imagine how much productivity is being lost with machines not running at full speed or having to be in the shop.   

I’ll let everyone know how our plan goes.  Either way a gentleman has found a great job and he’s trained and ready to take on the responsibilities of an electric pallet jack operator. 

Well, I think that’s enough for this week.  Let us know how you handle those drive and load wheels at your facility.  I’d appreciate it if you would tell a friend about our little podcast, the more the merrier!  And please check out the website at warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and remember by using that little @whseandops that you can find us on both Facebook and twitter!  I forget what our Instagram handle is but you can find it.  Until next week, be safe, utilize your pre-trips, take that extra 60 seconds, it could mean that you’ll make it back home after your shift.

Quit or Termed

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Marty T Hawkins back with you and another episode of Warehouse and Operations as a Career.  Is everyone having a fabulous week so far? Today let’s talk about a few of the things that we as employees sometimes must deal with, many times things we possibly bring on ourselves.  Throughout my travels each week I hear about lost jobs, NCNS, layoffs, and a lot of reasons why individuals have loss those jobs.  This isn’t probably something we like talking about, but I guess it is a part of the job cycle or career cycle so let’s look at it for a bit. 

Ok, being a manager for over 30 years I’ve had the fortune of meeting and hiring many an associate, mainly in the realm of operations only to see them move on to something else voluntarily and non-voluntarily.  Some found better positions or greener pastures and moved on and some through terminations.  I like to believe I’ve never actually ended someone’s job, well I guess I’d have to say I have ended 3, all 3 we’re due to a position actually being done away with due to a loss of cases, through a customer loss or once a particular product line, the selectors job was to pull that one line of product only.  In all 3 cases I helped them seek gainful employment at another company or made the effort and offered anyway. 

A V.P. of mine, kind of a mentor to me for several years, once told me, that he’d never terminated an associate, that they’d always terminated themselves.  He honestly looked at it as the rules, or processes and procedures weren’t being followed and as the associate knew that, that they had terminated themselves.  I guess that’s one way to look at it but I subscribe to the belief that I’ve failed in some way or another every time I’ve lost an employee.  I always wonder if they we’re given the Orientation properly and received the welcoming, they needed, had they received the training they needed, had management supported them in every way?  In previous episodes I spoke to the Corrective Action Process, what I prefer to call the coaching process and presented the question to young managers as “Did we give them every chance to succeed, did we discuss any job-related deficiencies’ we were experiencing with their performance & offer solutions to help them succeed?  Personally, I think the Orientation of a new associate is the one thing we as managers have to get right.  It’s where we have a chance to express how important they are to the organization, learn a little about them and share the expectations, rules, processes or procedures of the company with them.  It’s intimating walking into a new job & managers need to make us feel welcome and allow us to leave that first day wanting to come back early for the second one, right? 

Ok, I’ll step down off the soap box now you can see how easily I get sidetracked.  Let’s look at a few of the reasons I’m given by associates and managers each week from a few different industries I deal with, all types of positions and regions as to why a term form ends up being turned into our HR departments. 

Let’s start with the simplest, this is one I’ve never been able to get my arms around, the infamous NCNS.  I mean we as new hires have filled out the application, went through all the hoops to get the job, the interviews, background checks, maybe drug screens, we’ve filled out all the onboarding paperwork, had the job descriptions explained to us, maybe even met our coworkers and bosses and then don’t show up for our first day on the job, don’t call anyone, just kind of disappear?  Don’t get me wrong, things certainly come up sometimes and I don’t want you to think I’m being or going negative today at all but this one I’ve never figured out.  If we’ve decided the position just isn’t for us, and it’s going to happen sometimes, maybe something comes up in the job description that we figure woah, this isn’t going to be for me. But why don’t we just speak up right there and then?  I guess what I hope we think about is if we’re dealing with a staffing or sourcing company we’ve probably just burnt a bridge and while looking for permanent employment we should never burn any bridges! 

And then there’s the NCNS when we’re employed.  I hear almost weekly from an associate that says yeah, I got mad, or my boss didn’t treat me right so I decided not to go in.  I just don’t see how that’s fixed or hurt anyone, I don’t think we’ve won anything by quitting like that have we?  If someone’s made us mad or our boss did us wrong, wouldn’t it have been better to communicate that to someone, maybe their boss or our HR departments?  There’s not going to be a check with our name on it next week!  Again, I know things happen from time to time, but it’s rare I hear a valid reason from anyone concerning a NCNS.  A phone call is just too easy to make.  If we’re taking off no matter what our boss says, go ahead and do it, but call.  Then on our next interview we can say we’d asked off, had a valid reason but my boss fired me for missing.  It’ll go over better than them finding out about us NCNSing.  The NCNS we’d have to agree we’ve actually quit or terminated ourselves, right? 

I hear this one a lot, every week, Excessive Absentees and missing too much work.  Our employers are going to need a certain headcount to hit the needed productivity numbers everyday.  The hours and shifts were explained to us when we applied for the job and even if the hours were changed later, we were probably told about it and I’d assume we accepted them.  We stayed with the company so why are we surprised when our supervisor counsels us 1, 2 or 3 times and then lets us go?  Typically, we’re not terminated on our first or second absence in 90 days.  Again, I’m not being negative about us quitting our jobs, and I think we all would agree we’ve quit, we just took the long road to doing it, we knew it was coming, I think. 

Then there’s insubordination, when I hear this one I come close to understanding sometimes.  We here at WAOC have talked a few times now about handling ourselves in a professional manner, and boy that’s very difficult at times isn’t it?  If we assume we’re liking our job it’s important to remember we have other recourses than saying no to management or something like “that’s not my job”.  As long as the request is ethical and legal we need to do it.  Many times, we won’t know the reason or the end result but hey, we’re being paid and it’s just a part of it.  I was a high rise selector, I’d only been on the job for about 3 months and a supervisor hurriedly came to the back and asked me to go clean the men’s room real quick and disappeared.  I was still a new employee, had 2 kids at home that was going to want donuts when I got home that morning. Yep I was pretty upset but I went ahead and cleaned it up and wiped it down.  I hadn’t been finished but for like 5 minutes and another sup came by with an auditor from one of our larger accounts and sure enough they walked right on in to the men’s room to check it out.  I ended up working for that company for 26 more years.  As employees we have other resources when we get upset, we have management members and our HR departments we can see.  Another time, a couple of years later I had a young supervisor come back to high rise and tell me I needed to pull pallets while I was up in the air instead of bringing them down to the ground first.  I respectfully told him I was uncomfortable working around our Safety protocol and suggested we go check with the manager first.  He told me to go ahead and do it like I wanted to but get it done.  We became good friends after that, I’d actually helped him do what was right in that instance.  We need our jobs; there’s nothing to be gained by throwing a fit on the docks.  Let’s try and do as request and voice our opinions to another member of management.  By being insubordinate we’re really just quitting again, we’re probably fully aware of the consequences? 

And then there’s horseplay, this ones tough.  Our shifts are sometimes long, its hard to maintain our focus for 10 hours, keep our heads down and focus on our jobs isn’t it?  You know, there’s Safety concerns, quality concerns and we probably know the rules.  I hate hearing about a young employee, meaning a new employee, losing his or her job for horseplay.  I just always trust us more tenured associates will kind of mentor or advise the new boots to do the right thing.  Once again, I hope the consequences to horseplay has been explained to us.  With horseplay there may not be any corrective actions applied to us, It’ll depend on what we were doing I’d think.  Anyway, we probably knew better, why do we get upset when we’re dismissed, maybe its just a human nature thing. 

Several weeks ago I heard about an order selector that’d done something wrong, or at least his supervisor thought he had.  Anyway the selector ended up getting in the sups face and threatening to hit him.  In today’s world that’s a threat, could even be a terroristic threat since it happened at work.  The associate was walked off the property and honestly didn’t understand how the authorities could have been called.  He got hot, calmed down and was now out of a job.  That’s a good example how not handling ourselves in a professional manner can really cost us dearly. 

Here at WAOC we spend a lot of time talking about how to get our jobs, planning for our advancement and reaching our goals but keeping those positions are just as important.  Terminations are a part of the work experiences, and being such we should recognize our responsibilities in keeping those jobs.  It’s hard, we’re humans and we all have reactions but I think we’d all agree it’s easier to be in charge of ourselves and in many instances, prevent terminations. 

Again, I hope I didn’t come across as negative today, I’d like to think I presented us with something to think about and consider. If you’d like to add to our list of terminations or share an example or situation with our group please shoot an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com we’d love hearing from you!  Check out our Facebook and Twitter feeds too, @whseandops & we’d appreciate a Like and Follow should you find any interest there.  If you operate any type of powered Industrial Equipment check out the Facebook group Warehouse Equipment Operators Community group, we’re usually hanging around there through the week!  Until next week – Be Safe and lets all take care of our Families and our Positions!