Integrated warehouse and labor management systems lift efficiency by 18%

Hopewell Logistics, a third-party logistics provider in Brampton, Canada, was under increased pressure to reduce costs. With a new warehouse management system (WMS) and labor management system (LMS) tool, the company was able to provide clients with a 10% efficiency gain within four months before reaching 18% improvement in the first year.

The company’s 430,000-square-foot facility processes 60 million cases in and out per year. In an effort to get better visibility into labor productivity and to establish standards, the company sought a flexible way to collect detailed data. According to Brian Hishon, vice president of service delivery for Hopewell Logistics, the new WMS and LMS (West Monroe Partners, westmonroepartners.com; Accellos, accellos.com) must be able to react quickly to changes—sometimes over the course of a weekend.

“We have no trouble adjusting the system, which brings visibility into a half-million-square-foot warehouse right into the office,” Hishon says. “It tracks an employee from the moment they arrive to the moment their shift ends and every activity in between. Then, it brings live data to dashboards that managers can access on mobile devices. We thought we were running a pretty tight ship, but this sort of solution will point out whatever weaknesses you have.”

With data in hand, managers can determine how long a task took, how long it should have taken and how performance can be improved. The facility is now running at 99.5% accuracy, 1% above its key performance indicator (KPI) requirement. Hopewell plans to expand the use of labor standards and roll them out to other sites.