Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management helps you optimize labor allocation across functional areas in your distribution center (DC), such as replenishment, picking, sortation, consolidation, and packing areas.
Traditional WMS labor orchestration solutions struggle to optimize labor resources for a variety of reasons, including:
WMS software relies on pre-determined plans to orchestrate labor resources. These plans can get out of sync with reality quickly and continue diverging with conditions on the floor as the day goes on. Traditional WMS software struggles to adapt plans in real-time due to all the interdependencies across distribution center processes. As a result, there are often periods throughout the day when some areas of the facility are slow and workers sit idle, while other areas cannot keep up with their work due to being understaffed.
Many WMS orchestration tools optimize keeping labor resources busy, without taking into consideration the priority or urgency of the work itself. For instance, some solutions will activate lower priority orders to keep replenishers busy while a pick zone is falling behind and at risk of orders missing shipping deadlines.
Although many WMS products include dashboards that can visualize real-time conditions in a DC, DC supervisors can be overwhelmed by trying to digest and process all the data to decide how to re-allocate labor on the fly when areas start to fall behind or exceptions arise. Supervisors face decision fatigue trying to make dozens of time-sensitive labor management calls quickly to avoid delays.
Fulfillment Engines is the most flexible warehouse execution system (WES) for e-commerce and multichannel retailers and 3PLs. Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management helps you optimize labor allocation across functional areas in your distribution center, such as replenishment, picking, sortation, consolidation, and packing areas.
Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management operates based on real-time conditions in your DC. It’s not limited by pre-determined, static plans. The system monitors for changes continuously to give you greater operational flexibility and prevent functional areas from getting too far out of synch with the rest of the facility.
With Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management, you DC labor utilization is not only optimized, but your team is focused on completing the highest priority and most critical work to ensure all orders ship on-time and correct.
Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management helps reduce DC supervisor decision fatigue by offloading dozens of time-sensitive decisions, such as when to move workers and between which areas. Self-balancing Labor Management provides context about each decision to help you understand recommended moves, including the primary drivers behind the move and the expected benefit. You have the option of letting Fulfillment Engines execute the change automatically on your behalf or to only notify DC supervisors of the recommendation and let DC supervisors make the final call.
Fulfillment Engines can analyze more data in real-time than supervisors can process manually to help make better decisions quickly. A typical facility can lower its labor costs by 20% to 30% by automating labor management with Fulfillment Engines.
Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management is designed to run as a stand-alone module or alongside Fulfillment Engines Order Fulfillment and Replenishment. Self-balancing Labor Management can also run alongside your existing WMS and processes by using the Fulfillment Engines APIs to import your order and activity data in real-time or through a batch process. Fulfillment Engines analyzes data as it’s imported into the system to make instant recommendations based on the real-time conditions in your DC.
Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management is highly flexible. It can be configured to manage all labor balancing decisions automatically and autonomously, or to work as a source of recommendations for supervisors to first evaluate each recommendation, then execute labor allocation changes manually.
Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management uses many of the same criteria that DC supervisors use to manage labor allocations (e.g., pending work in the areas, cost of moving workers, individual productivity, and labor skill-level.). Fulfillment Engines offers configurable guardrails to ensure workers are not relocated too often (e.g., minimum time in role of at least 30 minutes) and prevent moves that don’t justify the payback.
Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management can be used to manage allocation of labor resources within functional areas (e.g., between pick zones) and across functional areas (e.g., between reserve, forward, and consolidation areas).
Fulfillment Engines Self-balancing Labor Management can also run alongside your existing WMS and processes by using the Fulfillment Engines APIs to import your order and activity data in real-time or through a batch process. Fulfillment Engines analyzes data as it’s imported into the system to make instant recommendations based on the real-time conditions in your DC.