The Crucial Benefits of Labor Management Systems (LMS)

Ever-tightening labor markets, coupled with increasing customer delivery expectations, are forcing operations managers across industries to do more with less. A great tool to assist the management of resources is a competent Labor Management System (LMS) software package.

Below are the many benefits of labor management programs – benefits your company can’t afford to overlook.

Capturing Crucial Data

LMS software captures, tracks and reports key operational data in near real-time to monitor progress against the planned objectives. This includes all hours used in the warehouse for tasks monitored. With accurate data, managers and supervisors will know the status of their entire team at all times to better allocate resources, maximizing productivity and your bottom line.

Enhanced Visibility

To make the right decisions at the right time, managers and supervisors need visibility to the flow of goods throughout their day in order to balance labor resources with the planned objective. LMS provides visibility into resource productivity through accurate, readily available reporting against objective standards.

With improved visibility (through LMS dashboard reports), managers and supervisors can see where their labor resources are being consumed and use this data to make more accurate and timely staffing decisions. 

Improving Resource Utilization

Next to inventory, labor and benefit costs are the highest operating expenses in warehouse production, leaving businesses trying to achieve the highest levels of productivity with the lowest head count to remain profitable.

Workload fluctuations between inbound and outbound goods in a warehouse require timely and efficient staff movements from different tasks and departments to ensure delivery performance.

The data provided by LMS can assist managers and supervisors in optimizing utilization of resources by addressing shortages and surpluses by department.

Increasing Employee Satisfaction

Employees working in supply chain operations are some of the most important resources in any company. Enabling these individuals to be highly productive, as well as successful, requires effective labor management practices and techniques.

LMS software solutions record employee activity data through feeds from multiple sources (ERP, WMS, and Payroll systems) and report on individual and/or overall productivity levels.

With the right LMS, your company can improve employee retention through use of fair performance targets and established coaching for success strategies. This positions companies to implement future employee incentive programs.

Monitoring Total Costs

Distribution and fulfillment center managers are under constant pressure to improve productivity and cut costs as the DC/FC volumes continue to grow year over year. Fortunately, LM systems enable the measurement of total throughput costs. They also provide one of the highest investment returns of any software you can implement in your supply chain.

Next Steps

Ultimately, an LMS assists in providing focus to your operation.

Conduct a simple Google search for Labor Management Systems and you’ll quickly see that there’s no shortage of companies providing solutions to labor management. But before you can choose the right LMS, you need to develop a change management strategy to ensure your success—and our next blog post will discuss change management in detail.

For more information, read the other posts in our labor management blog series including:

• 2020 Insight into Optimizing Labor (#1)
• Utilizing Change Management to Ensure Labor Management Success (#3)
• LMS Implementation Costs and Schedule (#4)
• How to Implement an LMS in Under 120 Days (#5)

Questions about LMS? Contact Sedlak Director of Client Services Tim Harlan at tharlan@jasedlak.com.