The Future of Manufacturing and Logistics

Frontline Supervisors

Explore how leveraging Veryable helps you eliminate common operational challenges and meet your objectives with ease as a
frontline supervisor in a manufacturing or distribution facility.

Your Priorities & Objectives

As a frontline supervisor you're in charge of executing the production schedule so that product gets to the customer on-time and at an optimal cost.  You also lead the communication across your team and coordinate with other parts of the business to solve operational problems and identify risks that put on-time delivery and cost targets at risk.  Frontline supervisors will encounter new challenges every day, and tough expectations from customers can create additional challenges.  Most challenges fall within these buckets:

  • Tools – without the right tools it's hard to know what you need to do, when you need to do it by, and how much you actually need to do.  Material availability, equipment downtime, and due date changes all have ripple effects on the plan.  Real-time data is needed, and plans should change with them.  When tools are not integrated with all of your systems or will be outdated in the near future, this means you'll have to spend time on replanning instead of execution.
  • Resources – while equipment capacity is important, most equipment has downtime and it's the labor or material that actually constrains it.  Without the right amount of labor, the right skills, on the right shifts it will be hard to hit your goals on-time and on budget, and even harder to make up missed time.
  • Time – misses to a production schedule requires that time to be made up outside of the schedule so it doesn't push out completion dates.  These misses typically snowball to off-shifts or to the weekend where overtime is needed to catch up and puts the frontline leader in a position to choose between being on-time or missing cost targets.  In areas that are scheduled 24/7 it is simply impossible to make up for missed time, and that part or work center become a bottleneck for the whole operation.

Without having the tools, resources, or time needed to do the job, production misses and late deliveries are inevitable.  Because of the impact this has on operations, frontline leaders typically have to report out and explain those misses along with recovery plans and corrective actions.  With a constantly changing plan, normal manufacturing issues, and inconsistent resources, a frontline leader spends the day fighting fires and trying to make the most out of each hour in between attending meetings.

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) will allow you to move the needle operationally and financially.

 

Leveraging Veryable’s On-Demand Labor Marketplace to build your labor pool will allow 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, and only when you need it will drive out excessive overtime costs 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

Veryable’s Workforce Management Tool ties together multiple systems (ERP, WMS, MES, HRIS, etc.) to use real-time data to automate the labor planning process and guide decision making.  This eliminates costly forecasting inaccuracies, and enables performance-based decision making without the need for tedious spreadsheet updates or back-of-the-napkin estimates. Plus, with Veryable's on-demand marketplace accessible within this tool, you can fill any gaps in your operation across all areas and shifts on short notice. The best part is, real-time performance data is visible in just clicks for both full time employees as well as Veryable Operators.

Together these tools will optimize your use of labor and help you to operate more efficiently and cost effectively. Now, instead of spending hours and hours juggling multiple tools and spreadsheets each week, you can let Workforce Management do the hard work. Then, when things pop up out of nowhere or an opportunity presents itself, you can leverage Veryable’s On-Demand Labor Marketplace to respond in real-time and fuel your desired output. This makes you faster, more efficient, and gives you an edge over the competition in numerous ways.

What You Can Accomplish

Leveraging Veryable's On-Demand Labor Marketplace to build a flexible extension of your full-time workforce will enable your team to scale labor capacity up and down in real-time to mirror actual daily demand. This has numerous operational benefits...

assembly line icon with clock to represent throughput
Address Production Outliers

Bringing in supplemental labor can help your team to:
*Tackle stranded or aged orders
*Break work in process bubbles
*Recover from quality issues & material delays
*Eliminate past due backlog

Increase Throughput & Productivity

Adding support in bottleneck areas means you can stop watering down the output of your skilled workers with non-critical tasks and allow these skilled workers to produce more

operational agility icon
Manage Demand Variation

* Flexing labor capacity daily helps you maintain short lead times and perfect service at an optimal cost per unit
* Unlimited flexible capacity means you can accept new orders that would have previously constrained capacity without the need for mandatory overtime
* With the ability to respond in real-time, you no longer have to hope and pray your demand forecasts are 100% accurate

Case Studies

Stories From the Real World

Hear from other frontline supervisors how Veryable helps them reach their goals with ease.

What Frontline Supervisors Are Saying

"My guys that are out there, they look at their schedule, they see what page counts they have, they know when they're gonna need extra folks in to help them out. And that allows them to go on there and say, hey, I need a couple of people on this day. I don't need nobody on this day, but I need someone else on this day. So they have that flexibility to pull people in as they need. It's worked extremely well."

Lloyd Lynch

Production Supervisor, Community Impact Printing

“Before Veryable, my crew was working unseen hours. You don't want to put that on a person, especially when you're trying to get that work life balance. Veryable came in handy where we were able to do the things we needed and give our employees a lot of relief.”

Whittaker Vogt

Warehouse Manager, Core-Mark

"Veryable has helped me put time aside for different projects that I have to focus on. Before, I would have to take on a lot of the extra burden. One day I would be palletizing. One day I would be on the wicking machine. I've even been in paint booth. Anything that's needed, I would be doing if it needed to happen. But with Veryable, I actually have the extra hands, the extra help, and so it has taken a big load off of my shoulders too."

Michael Kupferner

Night Shift Supervisor, Scentsational

“When Veryable came in, it really helped us out by giving us the flexibility of being able to pick our people, maybe even the same day. If I get up in the morning and go, ‘Oh geez, I need 10 more people,’ and post an opportunity for 10 people, I might have 25 people bid.”

Don Benson

Senior Supervisor, LSO

“it's tough to carry a large staff when you have peaks and valleys. So it's nice to be able to, bring in extra associates when needed, or reduce the staff when needed. I mean, it's all about keeping our labor cost per unit as low as we possibly can... That allows us to put money in other places, whether, you know, it's R&D, marketing, somewhere instead of having this big bucket for just labor costs."

Albert Kelly

Outbounds Manager, Made In Cookware

"So when the volume is really high, we get a lot of people in, and we're actually really able to evaluate performance. And then based on that performance, we can add specific tags to people. And once you had that tag to that profile, you know, hey, when we get down to lower volume and we need just, you know, these A players, we can go through and select those players in particular, and, things work out really well from there."

Jason Kichamu

Operations Production Manager, RTIC

Resources

Our Point of View

Explore our thought leadership blog for valuable insights.

March 24, 2021

How Fast Can You Find Workers with On-Demand Labor?

In this article, you’ll learn how quickly on-demand labor can get you workers, how reliable they are, and the factors that decide how quickly you can expect results.
February 24, 2021

Will Veryable Workers Impact Safety in My Workplace?

You’ve probably spent considerable time and money ensuring that your operations are safe and accident rates stay as low as possible. So it’s natural that you’d be concerned about safety when bringing in people you haven’t worked with before.
July 19, 2022

Do People Really Hate Their Job? (And Can You Change That?)

Learn what data says about whether people hate their jobs, what work arrangements are best, and how to ensure you have right-sized labor capacity.

Getting Started With On-Demand Labor

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