CognitOps Product
Labor Productivity and
Order Fill Rate KPIs
CognitOps Product Update – August 2024
We’ve had a busy summer here at CognitOps and have some exciting new features to share with you. In April, we introduced our new KPI dashboard to gather essential KPIs for each department into a single view for department supervisors. This view included Performance Pulse, Utilization, and Efficiency. You could think of these as measures of efficacy. Now, we’re expanding the Picking KPI dashboard to include Labor Productivity. Labor Productivity is the number of units or lines or grabs the team produces per hour for every hour they’re in the building, on the clock, from the first task to the last task. This shows the raw per-paid-hour measure of how much the team is producing.
We’ve also added a new view for Order Fill Rates at the Facility Level. This dashboard enables facility leaders to quickly see and understand their overall order fulfillment performance KPIs, see what orders are being impacted and by what, and then drill down to understand what’s happening at a detailed SKU level.
Labor Productivity
Other productivity measures CognitOps provides are limited to time on task, which is effective for showing how the team is performing when focused. But the Labor Productivity metric includes the entire time employees are in the building/on the clock. This allows facility supervisors with a budget to see how the team is marching toward the budget. They can plan their labor according to actual productivity measures, see how the team is doing according to historical performance, and view the forecast for the rest of the day.
We layered in an hourly view to show where they’ve been, where they’re going, and how they’re performing against how they typically perform during those times. At the start of the day, people are often very productive; there are no breaks, they’re crushing it. As the day progresses, productivity will degrade as 15-minute breaks, lunch, and fatigue come in. The Labor Productivity “Expected” number is a predictive analytic based on the work that will be released, where that work will land, and the workers in the building. Each customer’s typical productivity baseline can be configured according to a specific number of days – 30 days, 180 days, all time – by CognitOps’ customer success team to make the benchmark relevant to the customer.
As part of this update, we’ve also added an hourly view for Performance Pulse, Utilization, and Efficiency. The existing views showed a snapshot in time, but our customers have been asking for past, present, and future hourly views to help manage their workforce across the day and address any issues that may be affecting overall results.
Labor Productivity by Parent, Area, Zone
Labor productivity is affected by the type of items and type of work being done in the facility. For example, work grabbing larger items, such as appliances, will have a much lower rate simply because those items are more difficult and time-consuming to pull. Work that includes grabbing many smaller pieces from the same location can move much more quickly and have a higher productivity rate. So, if the bulk of the work is larger items at the lower rate, that will drag down the overall productivity measure and forecast.
This same analysis can be done by parent area for a higher-level view and by zone to dive even deeper.
This insight helps supervisors in 2 ways:
- Forecasting how the warehouse will perform compared to its historical baseline based on the quantity and mix of work that will be coming into the building.
- Understanding how the quantity and mix of work is impacting their actual results throughout the day.
Supervisors can understand and, perhaps even more importantly, explain when unexpected performance numbers are simply due to the mix of work or a result of performance issues that need to be addressed. CognitOps delivers this detailed insight in a way that LMSs simply can’t.
More than anything else, this productivity metric provides a sanity check for how they should expect the day to end and helps proactively set leadership expectations.
Distribution Center Order Fill Rates
We’re also expanding our Orders section with a new facility-level dashboard for order fulfillment performance: Distribution Center Order Fill Rates.
This includes 3 different KPIs:
- DC Fill Rate: shows the percentage of all the customer orders that were shipped in full.
- DC On-Time: shows the percentage of orders that shipped on time.
- DC OTIF: is the percentage of orders that shipped on-time and in-full.
We provide visibility into which specific orders and which order types are having fulfillment issues, so leaders can quickly identify where there are issues that need to be addressed.
We also enable visibility to which SKUs are impacting fulfillment performance, which will give the operations team data on which SKUs aren’t positioned correctly or are running low. For example, if 228 of a specific SKU was requested across 15 orders and only 136 were allocated, then they will need to identify if that SKU isn’t in stock or if it wasn’t restocked for picking in time. Providing quick access to these KPIs, the underlying order lines and SKUs allows the outbound team to talk to the inventory leaders about which SKUs they need to do a better job of getting positioned and stocked correctly to make sure that they’re able to fill orders.
Previously, facility leaders might only report out one or two of these KPIs and then only after the fact. This quick visibility shows them issues happening in real-time and highlights where they need to focus to get ahead of them.
Coming Soon
We’ve been building out our Facility module behind the scenes – stay tuned for more information on this functionality soon!
Author: Reas Macken Co-founder, COO & Head of Product
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