Workforce Optimisation: More than maths.

Many businesses consider workforce optimisation, and reducing costs, to be about one thing: maths.

But true Workforce Optimisation is much more.

Sure, mathematics makes up part of it. However, to make the most of what every employee has to offer, and to optimise your workforce management system, you need to start at the very beginning.

Begin with a strong focus on recruiting the best people, continuing to monitor performance, and developing their skills.  Then, to truly understand your workforce’s productivity, it is critical to understand individual motivation, when employees are on or off task, and how to engage them enough to encourage consistency, efficiency, and reliability. Maths can’t help you there.

BlueSky Workforce Optimisation (WFO) allows you to:

• Hire the right people, develop their skills, and consistently monitor performance
• Understand individual productivity levels among your team or workforce
• Use this productivity data to forecast performance, including inbound and outbound volume
• Optimise every shift to ensure peak performance
• Take advantage of real-time data to enable highly efficient and effective management
• View trends in performance, attendance, engagement and more
• Pay each team member fairly, every time, for their hard work.

Let’s take a closer look.

Recruit & develop exceptional team members

An exceptional workforce is the key to your business’ success. As part of your WFO system, efficient and reliable recruitment management enables a seamless process from accurate screening of candidates for essential skills and attributes, through to hiring, without wasting precious time.

The focus then shifts to effectively onboarding successful hires to set the tone, monitoring performance, and identifying areas for development. Proactive employee management and development is simple with an integrated system bringing all your tools to one place.

With the foundations set, and an ongoing performance management system in place for your workforce, maximising productivity and motivation become key to optimising your team’s performance.

Understand productivity & motivation across your workforce

A quality WFO system will enable managers to view collective and individual productivity across all teams and team members. Understanding each worker’s – and combination of workers – productivity enables your system to generate optimum shifts to create the best outcomes for the business.

With reliable productivity and performance tracking, and integration with your existing WMS, you are equipped with the tools to enable efficient and effective management. The result? More engaged and motivated employees. Identify who the high performers are, who can benefit from training or advice, and the combinations of team members that produce the best results.

And, by introducing objective performance incentives and rewards for outstanding employees based purely on performance data, you can significantly improve motivation, competition and engagement throughout teams.

Forecast results & optimise every shift

Rich historical performance data can be used to generate accurate forecast reports for expected performance. Use forecast data to schedule optimum shifts, ensuring that all skill, compliance and expected output requirements are covered. Your BlueSky system makes it simple, in only a few clicks, to ensure all the employees required to consistently achieve targets are rostered – with no unnecessary additions.

Using real-time data during every shift, managers can also view actual performance vs forecast results to ensure KPIs are consistently achieved. If not, the forecast benchmark can be used to take action in key areas and refocus team members where appropriate.

Use real-time data for efficient, proactive management

There’s no need to wait until the end of the shift, day, or week, to understand warehouse performance. Combining accurate forecasting with comprehensive real-time data from your WMS, enable proactive management to identify what is going wrong, when it’s going wrong, and how to address any issues before they have a significant impact on shift performance.

BlueSky’s real-time data covers:

• On- and off-task reporting
• Attendance management
• Performance & productivity management during every shift.

On- and off-task reporting

Most managers agree that it’s difficult (or impossible) to consistently keep track of who’s on and off task – especially in a large warehouse with hundreds of employees. With real-time on- and off-task reporting, it is simple to understand exactly who is working where they should be, and who to approach to get back on task.

With real-time data, there’s no need to wait until the shift is over to understand individual performance. Understand performance, as it happens, throughout each shift and make changes before they impact the day’s results. Use this data to your advantage for proactive workforce management.

Attendance reporting

Attendance management can be simple, and efficient, with the right tools. With an up-to-the-minute dashboard available on desktop and mobile, and configurable notifications, there’s no need to stand at the warehouse door to know for sure who’s clocking in on time. Whether you’re in the office, on the warehouse floor or working from home, efficient management of your team’s attendance is at your fingertips.

Why is this important for Workforce Optimisation? Understanding each team member’s engagement through their attendance and punctuality enables managers to identify factors including who needs to be monitored, when the team could benefit from incentives or rewards, and where productivity can be improved.

Monitor all KPIs

Your performance dashboard tracks and displays all warehouse KPIs as they happen. Including volume, Overall Work Rate (OWR), Direct Work Rate (DWR), Cost per Carton (CPC), Average Work Rate (AWR), indirect and absenteeism, all the information you need can be found in one easy to access dashboard on your BlueSky platform. React accordingly to performance issues before they become a problem.

Analyse performance trends with multiple reporting options

Make the most of comprehensive employee and warehouse performance data at your fingertips. A wide range of reports are readily available to analyse all aspects of your workforce and warehouse performance within your BlueSky system. These detailed reports allow you to efficiently analyse leave and productivity trends throughout peak seasonal times to ensure accurate rostering during different times of the year, drill down to understand individuals’ productivity over time, and more.

Ensure reliable payroll systems are in place

Your employees put a significant amount of effort into completing tasks to a high standard. It’s up to you, the employer, to ensure they are rewarded fairly for their hard work, and do not need to be concerned about inaccurate payslips.

By implementing a payroll system that’s integrated with your time & attendance and award interpretation systems, you can relax knowing that all team members are consistently receiving the pay packets they deserve.

Along with reducing risk for your business, ensuring that you’ve invested in a consistently accurate payroll system shows respect for your employees’ time and efforts in working to achieve your business’ goals.

It’s time to stop managing your workforce. Start optimising.

Reducing operating costs using only mathematical equations will only get you so far. Increase efficiency and optimise your workforce with proactive management from start to finish, to see significantly better, and longer lasting, results.

BlueSky Workforce Optimisation has proven results across a major Australian retailer’s distribution centres. This system has significantly improved performance over the last year, including up to an incredible 3% improvement on their Direct Work Rate.

Take Workforce Management to another level. Optimise your workforce for increased productivity, employee engagement, motivation and performance, which ultimately leads to improved customer satisfaction and growth for your business.

Interested in seeing how our Workforce Optimisation system works? Book a free, no obligations demo today. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]