Understanding the Hour-by-Hour Board: A Lean Tool for Efficiency
With its ability to provide real-time visibility, enhanced communication, and support data-driven decision-making, the HbH is an invaluable asset.
The Future of Manufacturing, Warehousing, and Logistics
Continuous Improvement
Explore how leveraging the Veryable solution helps Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, and Lean leaders more effectively reach their objectives
Your Priorities & Objectives
As an Operational Excellence, Continuous Improvement, or Lean leader, you're responsible for identifying, implementing, and sustaining strategies and processes that improve efficiency and productivity. There must be direct outcomes that improve operational performance, and those improvements must flow through to the ledger in the form of incremental revenue or reduced costs – both of which will improve margins.
Here are a few areas of focus that are critical to success in this role:
- Strategy Development and Deployment: You must develop a plan that helps the business reach its long-term goals by assessing the internal/external environments, and breaking it down into measurable and manageable steps. Once those milestones are sequenced, you must execute that plan by prioritizing efforts, assigning the resources, launching the technologies, and developing the tools to get there. Change management is critical in keeping everyone aligned, communicating progress, and solving problems.
- Project and Program Management: Transformation happens through the successful execution of a series of projects that build upon themselves. You will need to know how manage a single project from beginning to end that delivers a specific result. Depending on the scope of the transformation, size of the team, and timeline to deliver, there may require program level management of multiple projects in parallel, with interdependencies, and shared resources. Sustaining the results at each step is critical to reduce rework and hold commitments.
- Data Analytics: Accessing and understanding data is important in knowing what the current state looks like, where the opportunities are, and helping prioritize what to focus on. This same data will allow you measure the effectiveness and magnitude of those improvements from the baseline. Data can be time consuming when looking at it across multiple platforms, data sources, and time periods. Linking these can enable real time understanding and action.
- KPI/Financial Acumen: This is where improvement is proven. Without hard results it is impossible to quantify the impact of the “before” vs the “after”, defend the changes, or capitalize on the improved results. This is important for summarizing improvements to leadership, communicating service levels or lead time reductions for Sales teams to use, or capturing cost savings with finance to reinvest. The efforts should be visible on the KPI boards and they should also flow through on the P&L.
The Veryable Solution
Veryable’s On-Demand Labor Marketplace
Labor will directly or indirectly impact every aspect of your operational performance. It is also one of the largest expenses on your P&L. Working to eliminate labor waste (having too much, or not enough) in real-time will allow you to move the needle both operationally and financially.
Leveraging Veryable’s On-Demand Labor Marketplace to build a labor pool will enable your team to scale labor up and down in real-time and in lock step with actual daily demand. Having this capability across all areas, all work centers, and all shifts will give your operations at least 3x greater agility. Using this when you need it, and only when you need it will help you drive out excessive overtime costs and poor service during high demand periods and lost productivity during low demand periods. Additionally, by matching headcount to demand on a daily basis, you’ll be able to maintain a lower more constant cost per unit.
Veryable's Workforce Management Tool (WFM)
Veryable’s Workforce Management (WFM) platform brings together data from ERP, WMS, MES, HRIS, and other systems into a single source of truth for workforce planning and performance. By linking labor directly to real-time operational data, WFM eliminates reliance on spreadsheets, manual updates, and guesswork, giving CI leaders actionable insights to uncover inefficiencies, optimize labor allocation, and boost throughput across the operation. Automated scheduling ensures staffing aligns with actual demand, reducing overstaffing and under-resourcing while safeguarding performance and cost targets. And with integrated access to Veryable’s on-demand labor marketplace, teams can scale instantly to meet volume spikes or operational disruptions without straining core staff.
Real-time dashboards provide visibility into key metrics such as throughput, labor cost per unit, scheduled vs. actual hours, and individual or team productivity. This empowers CI managers to identify bottlenecks, benchmark performance, and implement best practices across sites. Coupled with employee-focused tools like schedule transparency, shift swapping, and performance recognition, WFM helps maintain engagement, reduce errors, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
Together, these capabilities allow CI leaders to maximize labor value, maintain operational consistency, and create repeatable processes that drive measurable improvements.
What these tools enable for Operational Excellence / Continuous Improvement:
- Strategy Development and Deployment: Veryable’s local operations team will help you develop the strategy that works for your business. Think of our team of operational strategists and technologists as an extension of your team.
- Program and Project Management: With our depth of experience across manufacturing, distribution, and warehousing, there is little we haven’t already solved. This expertise can be put to use for a single use case or more complex programs. Training, coaching, and progress pulsing is a part of our implementation.
- Data Analytics: Use of our platforms will help you consolidate multiple systems into one, and give you access to your data with customizable dashboards, reporting, and market level intel. Additionally, our operations intelligence and data analytics teams can help automate processes.
- KPI / Financial Acumen: Whether you're just starting to track On-Time Delivery, or we're dealing with complicated net labor efficiency calculations, our team can help you start where you are. We typically work alongside operations and finance teams to demonstrate savings and make sure they hit the bottom line.
- Lean Center of Excellence: The Veryable team has many Lean Practitioners and Six Sigma Blackbelts, who have developed some of these tools and thought leadership to help businesses put this knowledge to use. Click here to visit our Lean Center of Excellence.
- Thought Leadership: Learn best practices from Veryable's operations experts and business leaders from across our network by checking out our blog and searching across categories like: Productivity, Service Metrics, Lean Center of Excellence, "Creativity Over Capital", "Point of View", Operational Excellence, and Cost Reduction.
What You Can Accomplish
Leveraging Veryable's On-Demand Labor Marketplace to build a flexible extension of your full-time workforce and utilizing WFM to streamline the labor planning process makes it easier to reach your objectives in numerous ways.
Click the button below to explore our value estimation calculator and see the positive bottom-line impacts your business can achieve.
Address Production Outliers
Bringing in supplemental on-demand labor gives your team the flexibility to quickly address exceptions that slow down operations. With added support, you can:
-->Tackle stranded or aged orders before they escalate
-->Break up work-in-process bubbles that stall throughput
-->Recover faster from quality issues and material delays
-->Eliminate past-due backlog to keep commitments on track
Increase Throughput & Productivity
By adding support in bottleneck areas, you free skilled workers from non-critical tasks, so they can focus on the high-value work that truly drives output. This keeps production flowing smoothly, increases overall throughput, and ensures your most valuable talent is applied where it matters most.
Manage Demand Variation
Flexing labor capacity daily helps you protect short lead times and service levels, even as demand shifts. With unlimited flexible capacity, you can take on orders that would have once strained resources, without overloading your core team.
And because you can respond in real time, you no longer have to staff to historical averages and hope for the best—you can match labor precisely to actual demand.
Lower Operating Costs
Daily labor right-sizing eliminates two of the biggest forms of waste: overtime during peak demand and idle time during slow periods. By flexing headcount with on-demand capacity, you align labor directly to value-added work instead of carrying excess cost.
This creates a leaner cost structure, stabilizes margins, and frees up resources that can be reinvested into further process improvements, while also enabling more competitive pricing in the market.
Chart GPT: Smarter Insights, Zero Spreadsheets
Understand your operations instantly—just ask a question and get a chart. Toggle between views, export your data, and give quick feedback to refine results. This helps you spot trends faster, save hours on manual reporting, and make confident, data-driven decisions in real time.
Customized Reporting: Complete Operational Visibility
WFM lets you monitor labor and production KPIs like cost per unit, UPH, and scheduled vs. actual hours, all in one streamlined view. These real-time insights help you spot trends, pinpoint inefficiencies, and drive continuous improvement.
Value Summary: Enabling Smarter ROI Tracking
Within the Performance tab on your Veryable business portal, the Value Estimator calculates the potential bottom line impact of on-demand labor using real-time performance data and key operational metrics. Track your bottom-line gains as they happen to guide smarter decisions, boost efficiency, and control costs.
Platform Features
Tools & Features That Help You Get The Job Done
Case Studies
Stories From the Real World
Hear from our business users how Veryable has helped them achieve operational excellence
What Our Business Users Are Saying
Resources
Our Point of View
Explore our thought leadership blog for valuable insights.
POV: Lean Leader - Any Part, Any Quantity, Anytime.
Adding integrated tools like Workforce management (WFM) and the Standard Work module allow you to optimize your operation no matter what comes your way
Sustaining the 6S Method: Tips for Long-Term Success
In this blog post, we will delve into the importance of sustaining the 6S method and provide you with tips to maintain the gains achieved
Getting Started With On-Demand Labor
Creating your free business profile only takes 5 minutes. Our team of experts will reach out shortly
after to answer any questions you may have and ensure that your team is setup for success.
