The Key to Productive Workforce Scheduling in Transportation and Retail Logistics
Workforce scheduling is crucial in the transportation and retail logistics industries, where efficiency and customer service are paramount to remaining competitive. These industries, however, are plagued by labor shortages. These staffing pressures have worsened since the pandemic. At the same time, the pandemic has given the e-commerce boom further momentum. Truck drivers are in high demand and hard to come by. Warehouses are also struggling with staffing shortages. How can you improve warehouse employee scheduling and driver scheduling to achieve productivity in this context? How can you attract skilled workers? The key to productive workforce scheduling in transportation and retail logistics lies in a comprehensive workforce management solution.
By Merlijn Gootjes
Workforce scheduling challenges
To put the workforce shortage into context, let’s look at some numbers. Bloomberg reports that the US was already short 60,000 drivers in 2019. This number is expected to reach 100,000 by 2023. Even in cases where companies manage to attract enough drivers, they may have another capacity bottleneck in the warehouse. Online selling is causing delivery sizes to become smaller and delivery frequencies to become higher (same day). This puts more pressure on existing warehouse operations and will lead to an increase in regional warehouses. Before the pandemic, the warehouse industry had to fill an estimated 450,000 jobs. Today, direct-to-consumer fulfillment operations can require nearly ten times as many employees.
Because companies struggle to find the right people, they often have to hire temp workers, which is more expensive if the exception becomes the norm. Besides, it takes coordination to ensure agencies deliver the right people at the right time. Moreover, frequently they need to be trained, which puts a strain on the schedule as well.
Lastly, trucking and warehousing jobs are physically demanding, and employees rarely have any say in their work times, so churn is a common problem. People often leave their jobs in trucking or warehousing in search of more work-life balance.
How are other organizations addressing these challenges? Many are combining state-of-the-art forecasting and optimization with mobile solutions that facilitate employee engagement and self-deployment.
Optimization in workforce scheduling
The projected workload should provide a solid foundation for workforce scheduling. However, it is often not good enough in today’s volatile business environment. Planners have difficulty coping with fluctuations in demand and assigning the right people to shifts when unexpected circumstances arise. The challenge grows when dealing with seasonal patterns, promotions, and holiday periods. Spreadsheets are the most prevalent planning tool, and seldomly are they integrated with other systems. In most cases, they are inadequate to deal with the level of complexity at hand.
That is why many companies are seeking workforce scheduling solutions with forecasting and optimization capabilities. Advanced algorithms accurately forecast the workload and optimize the number of shifts to match within minutes. Scenario analysis capabilities enable planners to compare different schedules depending on trade-offs such as costs. Rosters are often drafted decentrally and reviewed by a central planning team that optimizes temp worker hiring and deployment. These solutions usually account for specific labor regulations and also accommodate individual employee preferences. However, gathering staff preferences and working them into the schedule is not always easy. That’s where mobile solutions come in handy.
Mobile meets workforce scheduling
While forecasting and optimization are crucial, workforce management today needs to go further. It should involve employees in the planning process to drive employee retention and engagement. Many companies are turning to mobile to streamline both planning and communications. For instance, by using mobile apps that enable staff to influence or even create their schedules. This type of solution will allow employees to:
- View their personal schedule and their team's schedule
- Gain insight into their leave balance and file their leave requests
- Enter their availability and shift preferences
- Submit shift swap requests
- Receive notifications when colleagues request a swap or when something changes in their schedule
- Bid on additional shifts
For drivers, specific apps are also available that enable them to communicate information to planners in real-time. This helps to inform planners about road closures, traffic incidents, or other unexpected circumstances on the road. They can also comment on routes and request changes.
Self-scheduling is not widely adopted in transportation and retail logistics. However, it is well-established and successful in the health care industry, where it is used to determine between 80 and 90% of all shifts. This novel approach can also be applied to warehouse employee scheduling or driver scheduling.
As a best practice, companies are also adopting mobile apps incorporating engaging communication features, such as chat functionalities, company news streams, social walls, and other ways to keep staff engaged.
The key to productive workforce scheduling in transportation and retail logistics
The key to productive workforce scheduling lies in a comprehensive workforce management solution. Learn more by reading success stories from industry leaders:
Logistics service provider CB
CB is a logistics service provider focused on the publishing industry. Declining demand for (physical) books led to a decrease in transport efficiency. They experienced a decrease in total shipment volume but an increase in small shipments. This created new challenges in workforce scheduling. Employees kept track of all orders and planned tasks in an Excel file. Leaves of absence were recorded in a log. This solution had several drawbacks, including its static nature and error sensitivity. They decided to change their approach to workforce scheduling.
First, they adapted a centralized overview of resources at all CB locations in a single workforce scheduling system. Multiple planners can use the tool at the same time to support each other. Second, they adopted a cyclical schedule. This ensures that schedules are automatically generated; planners spend no more than 30 minutes creating and checking the schedule. In the past, it took an average of 2 hours to plan, let alone check the schedule. Today, they can focus on more value-generating tasks. Finally, individual employee preferences are much better taken into consideration. By eliminating drawn-out discussions and taking an objective look at the rules and preferences, CB has both efficient route planning and satisfied employees.
Quantore
On the retail side, Quantore experienced similar benefits by using a comprehensive workforce management approach. This reseller of office supplies wanted to better match supply and demand, and prevent employees from working too many hours during quiet periods. At the same time, they wanted to give employees the possibility to submit their preferences using a mobile solution.
In the past, Quantore’s planners would routinely fiddle around with Excel. Now, they can generate a schedule automatically, taking employee preferences into account, using optimization. Customers receive superior service, because planners and schedulers can work in an organized way using an optimized overview. Employees get up-to-date information on their leave days and hours worked. This enables them to view changes at any time of the day and from any location, thereby improving work-life balance and increasing employee engagement.
Curious about how you can drive productivity and engagement with our workforce scheduling solution? Contact us to learn more.
