As warehouses start planning for peak, one area they will be, or should be, assessing is their technology. Peak places a huge amount of pressure on people, systems and processes. Ensuring the warehouse IT is working optimally is a key step that can be taken in advance of peak to ensure that worker productivity is maximised.
One of the most important, but often overlooked steps, is to review the rugged mobile hardware that will be used for picking, packing and put away. Give the hardware a health check and ensure that poorly performing batteries, scratched screens and broken scanners are fixed now, rather than waiting until peak hits. This will ensure you have plenty of time to get devices working and ensure they don’t get held up in a backlog or waiting for replacement parts to come in from overseas.
Whilst looking at the devices, talk to your workers and ask them if they are experiencing connectivity issues – they might describe these as crashes, reboots, lost Wi-Fi or any manner of other terms. In a recent survey we did, we found that 84% of warehouse workers experienced lost productivity because their device lost its connection to the WMS. The lost connection often resulted in lost data and required the worker to restart the device and the workflow. According to our survey, connectivity issues result in 50 minutes of working time being lost per day per worker, as they try to resolve the issue. This is often compounded when the worker needs to call on support from the IT Department to help them solve the problem.
This connectivity issue is called dropped sessions and it is disruptive enough in normal day-to-day activities but is only exacerbated during peak. The increased number of warehouse staff and corresponding rugged devices means the productivity impact increases exponentially during peak.
And yet this problem is easy to solve by using Terminal Emulation (TE) software that delivers session persistence and guarantees no dropped sessions.
A simple change of TE provider could improve the productivity of your existing warehouse staff so much that you won’t need as many temporary staff to cover peak as you first thought. With no end to the labour shortage in sight, companies should be looking to maximise the productivity from their existing staff to minimise their reliance on temporary workers.
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