Have you ever felt that you wanted to wrap duct tape around your head to keep it from exploding? From what I have observed over the years, I believe that many employees who are engaged in typical DC operations have this feeling far too often.

When starting work on a new project, it’s not unusual for me to get a stark reminder that it is not the employees on the floor who keep repeating the same old mistakes. Instead, it's those of us who have the responsibility for planning the process.

An employee whose primary assignment is focused on a single task doesn't have the exposure, or breadth of view to be able to re-plan a complete process in the warehouse or distribution center. But, they can certainly see, and feel, when they are doing the same silly thing over and over again.

When a task gets done and undone, and then maybe re-done, management calls it an exception. To the people on the floor, it's a SNAFU (we all know what that military acronym stands for) and just plain stupid!

Some Examples and Observations

As an example - I watched an operator struggling to fit too many cartons into a lane of flow racks in the replenishment picking area. After several minutes, he wound up putting some on the floor, and then said he would come back to do the rest when there was space in the lane again. And I thought, yes, if someone doesn't move them into a black hole first. With a little luck, he’ll return just in time to complete the replenishment operation before the picker runs out of inventory and creates a short on a customer order.

Another observation – shortly after a major sales campaign or season, it is not uncommon to find a large number of highly qualified employees busy with handling returned goods. This is generally a tedious and time-consuming process. One has to wonder why so much of this product, which is carefully inspected, refurbished and repackaged, sits for so long on the shelf, and then is often sold-off at reduced prices, or even worse, scrapped.

Employees ask, "Why didn't we know this sooner?" Actually, someone probably did have the right information available to know this when the return was authorized, but their focus was on credit and salvage, not on the probable ultimate disposition of the merchandise. In my experience, returns often add excess inventory to a dying product.

The employees know that these are wasteful processes, but the “system” keeps asking them to do it time after time.

Supervisors and management, too, know that this happens repeatedly. They listen, but don't really hear, or act. Or, so it appears to the people.

What happens when management does nothing? Employees get frustrated. They don't think that it's important to do the job right the first time, because they are going to have to do it again, anyway. They lose confidence in their direct supervisors and begin to wonder about how smart management is really. Ultimately, that can lead the best to look around for more satisfying work.

They Are Your Most Valuable Resource

Your hands-on employees are the best critics of a proposed new process. Not just because they've never done it that way before, but because their daily life is filled with dealing with exceptions. Too often, a new proposal assumes that everything will work according to plan, and it looks to the operators that the exceptions will bring it crashing down. To gain employee confidence, there must be openness, respect and two-way education. Using this invaluable resource in the planning process reveals these gaps early, creates understanding and buy-in, and, ultimately, a more robust process design.

Final Thoughts

Some say that as the economy begins to recover, businesses will again face a shortage of qualified people to fill jobs. Running off the best people simply because broken processes aren’t getting fixed is not only wasteful and costly, it is just poor management.

So the bottom line is: talk to your floor associates consistently. Do a lot more “management by walking around.” Implement “ideas” programs that have real and meaningful incentives. Make sure you get lots of operator input before any change in process.

If I was running a DC, I might even start a running list of “The 5 Dumb Things we need to Stop Doing.” I bet if managed well, it would be very popular – and lead to real efficiency gains.

Agree or disgree with Holste's perspective? What would you add? Let us know your thoughts for publication in the SCDigest newsletter Feedback section, and on the website. Upon request, comments will be posted with the respondent's name or company withheld.

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