When understanding the general public sentiment related to your company, almost nothing compares to your average customer’s experience from discovery to purchase to support. There will be specific factors that may lead to churn, such as a negative experience when calling customer support or receiving a product that just doesn’t meet expectations. 

Are you short on labor resources, or are you actually just coming up short on proper allocation?

In an earlier blog post, we said that defect prevention depended on understanding the root cause(s). Because this is such an important part of the problem-solving process, let’s explore it further.

Having on-demand labor at your fingertips is a great competitive advantage, but many businesses have questions about how bringing in new operators might affect quality. 

Local workforces are a microcosm of the overall state of the labor market. In a tight labor market, the local workforces often feel it most strongly. When a large employer moves into town, this often causes a shift in the workforce that can be quite disruptive. A concept known as the Dutch Disease can reveal some insights into how to deal with this issue.

Want a real challenge? I challenge you to find a factory with more than 20 people that doesn’t at least try to apply 5S.

Implementing heijunka to level your production is a longstanding approach to manufacturing. However, it can bog down your business when it is used as a self-imposed, artificial constraint on production.

Maybe you’ve heard of critical path project management, but what about critical chain project management? You might be wondering what the advantages could be of this project management approach.

You’ve likely been here before: you get an order that’s unusually large from your customer. And then another customer, and another customer. So you take that as a sign that demand has increased for your product, and you order enough supplies to sustain this level of demand based on your forecasts. Then a couple weeks later, your demand has settled back to its average level. What happened?

Far too often operations leaders view ‘the supply chain’ as an endless cost center rather than an opportunity to gain an edge on their competitors. Because of this, misconceptions over supply chain decisions handcuff organizations from improving operations & ultimately improving business outcomes.

Maintenance isn’t what most people think of when they think of getting work done. It’s right up there with washing dishes, at the top of the list of things people let slide until they can’t ignore it anymore. However, savvy operations leaders know how important it is to stay on top of equipment maintenance proactively.

It’s unfortunate, but sometimes a worker is going to leave you out to dry. When you found them through an on-demand labor platform like Veryable’s, there are a few things you can do in this case.

So you find yourself understaffed. It happens to everyone, especially when it’s hard to find workers and the labor market is competitive.

Imagine this: you drive in to work expecting everyone to show up for their shift and planning how you’re going to finally get ahead for a day and start tackling your backlog. Then when you get to the morning huddle, two of your 20 employees aren’t there. This ruins the productive day you had envisioned.

Your operation cannot seem to get over the workforce hump and hit its stride because people keep walking out the door, which is holding back productivity and preventing you from growing the business. Across the United States, distribution and fulfillment centers are experiencing turnover rates of 50% on average, while others are experiencing even more dramatic turnover rates approaching 100%. 

Sometimes businesses aren’t seeing the results they wanted from on-demand labor. While some things are certainly out of your control, we know that there are best practices that you can follow to be sure you’re doing everything to get the performance you want.

In a perfect world, each Operator you accept will be exactly who you need to support your Operations. While there are thousands of great, highly skilled, and reliable Operators working on the Veryable platform, you might encounter some others that are not a great fit at your business. 

So you’re new to on-demand labor, and you end up hitting a roadblock that you weren’t expecting. You’re excited about the potential of Veryable for your business, but aren’t so sure any more. What now?

Imagine you are starting your morning on a Tuesday. You’ve got a cup of coffee and everyone is rolling up to work so you can push out a big order by the end of the week. Just as you’re leaving your office, you hear the phone ring. The call is for a big order that’s way above what you forecast for the week. 

If you find yourself overstaffed, it’s probably because at some point in the year, you will need the number of workers that you have. You don’t want to get caught understaffed when a big project comes up, so you take what seems like the lesser of two evils and hire more people than you really need throughout the rest of the year. 

When you’re first looking into on-demand labor, it’s a bit intimidating to consider all the ways this new model might or might not work for your business. You probably want to know what might go wrong. Even if you’re not thinking about it now, we know it’s important for you to be aware of the problems that could exist with a solution like ours. 

You’ve heard of on-demand labor, and maybe you’ve been looking for a solution to add flexibility to your operations. But it isn’t always easy to take those first few steps. So, what’s the right way to start using on-demand labor?

Have you ever stared ahead at a busy next week and just knew that it will be a challenge with overtime on the rise, and the very real possibility of people taking unscheduled days off? If so, you’re not alone. Solutions to these problems have typically been to allow overtime to rise or risk customer dissatisfaction by pushing out customer promise dates.

As an Operations Leader, you’re tasked with keeping products moving efficiently through your operation. But, half the time you are putting out fires related to missed deliveries, extended lead times, and rework - which probably originated with workforce issues related to turnover and callouts.

You know that as soon as a few individuals don’t show up for work one morning, you’re thrown into scramble mode to cover their shifts and redistribute the work. Unfortunately, this can lead to missed deadlines, and your key performance indicators are shot for the week. 

The US manufacturing sector is facing a significant challenge to fill 500,000 jobs and handle the constant workforce turnover that local competition for labor generates. Even as manufacturers’ optimism recently reached an all-time high of 92.4%, a large majority (68.2%) cited the inability to attract skilled workers as their top challenge.

Whenever you kick off a demand planning cycle, you may get the feeling that it's an exercise in futility. Honestly, it is difficult to reliably predict future business, and it probably feels like consulting a crystal ball would be just as useful. Odds are variances to plan will grow wider and wider as your business progresses through the planning window.

Inventory Management

Within the walls of a manufacturing or distribution facility, lots of things can change that will drive productivity down.  It's a constant battle to maintain throughput standards.  A big factor that influences warehouse productivity is inventory management, particularly classification and storage profile.  Our take on improving your warehouse workforce is in a previous blog post - Building a Better Workforce.

Labor Trends in US Manufacturing

As we mentioned in the Megatrends post, US manufacturers are facing a number of headwinds when it comes to sourcing their labor.  These manufacturers differentiate themselves by employing a skilled labor force to create products.  However, Most US manufacturers are small firms with 75% of them employing 20 people or less.