Business Chief USA February 2019

FINTECH
measure their own performance on
KPIs to that of respondents within the
same demographic, based on industry,
type of customer served, type of picking
operation, and other factors. “This will
help to answer questions like where
should we make improvements, and
what specific activities should we be
looking at” in order to make those
improvements, Tillman explains.
The research team also takes a
deep dive into the findings to uncover
trends and explore whether they have
an impact on warehouse performance.
They sometimes turn up surprises. For
example, this year, five of the top 10
performance metrics respondents
said they use most often were related
to labor. Just two years ago, four of
those (contract employees as a percentage
of total workforce; overtime
hours as a percentage of total hours;
part-time workforce to total workforce;
and percentage of employees
who are cross-trained) were ranked
at the bottom of respondents’ lists.
Another surprise: Adoption rates
for some efficiency-enhancing technologies
has not grown as much
as expected. For example, only 65
percent of respondents are currently
using a warehouse management
system (WMS), a long-established
technology that’s generally considered
to be a “must have.” Moreover,
there was no statistically significant
difference in performance between
companies with and without a WMS.
In the team’s estimation, this probably
reflects current users’ failure to
fully utilize the software’s capabilities,
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