Attacking the peak

Being proactive now can save you when the busy season hits.

By Jim Apple -- Modern Materials Handling, 10/1/2006

It's that time of year again, when we start to worry about how we will make it through the peak season without disappointing customers or killing ourselves.

Of course, it's normal to hire additional part-time staff to cover peak periods of activity. How many people we need depends heavily on how well-trained they are and whether or not they stick it out through the toughest times.

If we wait until the demand hits to bring them in, we actually lose capacity until they are fully trained. Although the training investment seems costly, the better trained they are, the fewer we will need at crunch time.

A friend in a direct to consumer business offered the following suggestions:

• People referred by current full-time employees generally make the best part-time workers.
• Realistic opportunity for full-time employment for the best performers is a strong incentive.
• Begin hiring two months before the peak. Since demand is actually lower at this time, the total hours required to get the work done won't keep everyone busy for eight hours a day. Take some of the surplus hours away from the full-time employes in order to maximize training time and make it worthwhile for the part-timers to show up. There will be plenty of time to go around once the season hits.
• 100% quality checks on the temps for the first week or two is feasible during this period of lower activity. It will help in identifying additional training needs.
• Train on the simplest tasks first, but allow time to crosstrain on tougher tasks. You'll be glad you did!
• Bonuses for sticking it out through the season are appropriate. Include something for the full-timers who helped with recruiting. Their example and peer pressure help to keep the team together.

Additionally, you might try some of these:

• Divide complex tasks into two parts; one simple and the other more difficult. Then staff with a team of a full-timer paired with a part-timer.
• Some processes, like gift-wrapping, are in much heavier demand at peak. Consider an assembly line approach with short, well-defined work steps. Be careful to keep the line balanced. And, make sure that there is an experienced full-timer in place for quality control.
• Take advantage of the increase in single-line orders of very popular items. Pack these directly from full cases, eliminating the picking process.
• Maintain a steady flow through critical capacity bottlenecks such as manifesting and shipping by balancing labor in upstream processes.

In large operations, high-speed unit sortation systems often represent the most critical constraint. There are a number of opportunities to squeeze a little more capacity from them:

• Increase the batch size by putting more orders in a chute, possibly combined with the teaming suggestion above.
• Bypass sortation with orders that may be completed with a sub-set of popular products.
• Increase the use of the chutes by dynamically assigning orders to them as products appear from picking. An extension of this approach will result in a continuous flow, waveless process that enhances both picking and sorter utilization.

There are many ways to get over the peak, but all of them require starting the planning now.