Project Objective

The problem facing the client is in regards to their intra-day labor allocation system. Given the infancy of the warehouse, they have been using a fairly manual process of allocating floor workers to various tasks that need to be accomplished throughout the day. This has been working for them so far, but the warehouse is scaling massively to service more and more restaurants over the period of the project, from 91 at the beginning of the project to 215 in June of 2021. They are also planning on staffing many more employees per day, from 35 at the beginning of the project to 60 at full scale. The current process for allocating labor mid-day will not survive the scaling of the warehouse because the current process that warehouse supervisors use is very time-consuming and manual, taking up to 4 hours per day out of a supervisor's shift. Supervisors either use the current warehouse management system software to run reports, which is slow to run and often incomplete, or physically observe what is happening on the floor to collect data, which requires them leaving their office, which takes a lot of time. Additionally, the utilization of floor workers (68%) is too low to maintain a good pace going into full scale. By streamlining the labor allocation process for supervisors and reducing the amount of time they spend doing that, they will be able to make more intelligent labor allocations, raising the amount of direct work that the floor workers do, ensuring that the disproportionate amount of work they are intaking will be matched by the number of employees they will hire. If this does not happen, there could be massive overtime charges or restaurants could go without the necessary supplies needed to serve their customers. The main opportunities that our team identified were a lack of supervisor visibility into relevant data, and a few select indirect tasks that were not contributing to the floor worker utilization percentage (IWAIT and ISTART).