I recently watched a Webcast by Dan Gilmore about Labor Management. Dan essentially belabored the point (no pun intended): labor management is important for your warehouse. I will echo one of the points that Dan made in the webcast: labor management is much more effective in driving efficiency if you do predominantly piece picks.  It’s less effective in full case or pallet zones.  The reason is straight forward. Much of the labor savings in a warehouse is realized when you reduce the travel time and piece pick has a significantly more potential to cut travel time than case or pallet picks.

Not many are aware that Oracle WMS actually has a labor management feature. Obviously the usability of this product can be somewhat better but it does what it’s supposed to do Here are some tips to use WMS Labor Management system effectively:

1. Define Labor Standards: This is the basis of any labor management system and Oracle ‘s system is no different. If the labor standards in the warehouse do not reflect reality, the resulting report will be garbage too. If you don’t want to spend time and effort on getting labor standards using time and motion study, simply use historical averages. WMS lets you do that.
2. Keep it simple: Oracle labor management system allows you to define labor standards against multiple parameters e.g. you can define standard pick time and travel time to perform case picks in a refrigerated zone. My suggestion: keep it simple. Don’t attempt to define complicated labor standards e.g. standards for conveyable products in a floor zone for different pick equipment types. There are two reasons I am cautioning against overly complicated standards. One, the user interface is not designed for complicated setups. Second, you risk entering incorrect standard times for unusual pick configurations.
3. Focus on piece pick area: As mentioned before, you will get more efficiency gains from your each or piece picks. Therefore focus on entering more detailed and accurate information on piece pick zones.
4. Focus on picks: Forget putaways or replenishments. Most productivity gains will be accrued in your outbound picks. Focus on picks.
5. Don’t try to use it as a tactical tool: Labor Management in Oracle WMS works well if you are interested to know average picker productivity and especially the trend over time. It can also be used to benchmark your pickers against a standard. However it’s possible, it is not a good tool for daily or wave level load balancing or using it for day-to-day resource planning. Wave planning gives you greater flexibility to plan wave level labor and resource requirements. Unfortunately the two systems use different sets of data even though they relate to essentially the same thing.

Last thing I want to point out is that, you do not need to be restricted to just the out of the box reports available in labor management. The greatest advantage is that labor management stores the most granular labor and task execution information. The rich data can be very easily used to generate customized reports and analytics.