According to industry research, labor is the single-largest key to reducing costs and increasing profitability in warehouse operations. Traditionally, 65 to 70 percent of the cost of warehouse operations is labor, so there is significant potential for savings. Measuring performance can be difficult and often misleading. If it can't be measured, it can't be managed.
A GENCO Supply Chain Solutions' LMS increases productivity, efficiency and quality and provides an objective way to accurately measure performance in all functional areas by eliminating subjectivity and guesswork. It helps identify unproductive use of time, assists in managing processes and eliminating unnecessary steps and identifies training and development needs for workers.
Benefits of LMS
GENCO Supply Chain Solutions combines LMS with Engineered Labor Standards (ELS), which takes into consideration task travel time, equipment speed, motion required to perform the task, motion frequency as well as facility XYZ coordinates to calculate the expected amount of time to accomplish a specific task.
GENCO Supply Chain Solutions utilizes computer-aided time/motion studies to develop discrete labor standards. Through multiple regression analysis and work sampling along with management-based observations and computer-aided data collection, reasonable expectancies are developed and applied.
However, it is vital that a warehouse management system (WMS) be linked with LMS/ELS. At times, there may be large amounts of data that a WMS may not be capturing, which is required for LMS/ELS to be effective. For a successful LMS/ELS to function properly it is very important to track multiple elements that normally are not accounted for in a WMS.
When GENCO Supply Chain Solutions installed a LMS, at a major manufacturing customer's distribution center, two targeted improvements were clear - increase productivity and decrease non-productive activities.
Within eight months, the customer had gained over 10 percent in productivity and decreased non-productive hours by over seven percent. When ELS was added eight months later, an additional 10 percent productivity was realized. Combining LMS and ELS, GENCO Supply Chain Solutions realized 20.1 percent in productivity gains.
Working on its third and fourth LMS installations, GENCO Supply Chain Solutions continues to build on its track record based on solid experience.