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Labour force management – a tool to lean production
"The challenge is to get 460 employees with different attendance profiles and an order system for fresh food with very short delivery terms to interact with optimal result."
At Coop Denmark's huge fresh-food terminal in Hasselager, ProMark from Mark Information provides the foremen in each department with a tool to adapt the number of man-hours to the tasks of the day, and thus ensure the optimum capacity at all times.
Many factors can influence demand in the shops of Coop Denmark (Kvickly, Brugsen and Fakta), and thereby which articles these shops order from the chain's large fresh-food terminal in Hasselager near Århus, for delivery just a few hours later.
– Many of these factors are known, of course, and you can then predict their effect, explains senior clerk Henning Hansen, who is responsible for system maintenance and design, and is also supervisor on the ProManagement system now used for employee scheduling.
– This could be e.g. general seasonal fluctuations, or it could be fluctuations triggered by our weekly flyers, though these are of course known in advance. On the other hand, a period of very poor or extremely fine weather will also influence our need for manpower in each product group considerably, and is that much harder to predict.
Many attendance profiles and deadlines
– The challenge is to get 460 employees with different attendance profiles and an order system for fresh food with very short delivery terms to interact with optimal result: Shops send orders up until 4 pm, we start dispatching goods at 8 pm, and the first trucks leave at 10 pm. Only the delicatessen products are handled during the day and not delivered until the next day, concludes Henning Hansen.
This comprehensive puzzle made management of the fresh-food terminal invest in the planning module ProManagement from Mark Information, Scandinavia's largest supplier of systems for time registration, shop floor registration and employee scheduling.
Co-ordination of production plan and manning
The ProManagement module gives us a total visual overview of our employees, production resources and production plans, and this enables the line managers to utilize their resources better, e.g. by identifying unused over-capacity or eliminate bottlenecks in the department or in the company, explains Managing Director Steffen Meyer, Mark Information.
You could say that ProManagement is the budget-responsible manager's "ERP system" (Enterprise Resource Planning). – Here he can plan and control his employee resources in relation to the production plan indicated by the company's MRP II system (Manufacturing Resource Planning) by co-ordinating resource needs with the roster schedule.
Such co-ordination immediately identifies disproportion between planned need and actual attendance plan, and thus it shows where there is a need for adjustments in redundant or too low capacity. Finally, the manager can calculate what any given roster has cost or will cost the company in real money. In this way, it becomes very obvious what can be saved by finding the optimum roster.
Available hours is the key
The need and thereby the starting point for staff scheduling varies from company to company and often even from one department to the other.
The controlling parameters can be the assignments that need to be carried out, the production capacity or employee skills. In all cases the objective is to consider the principles for “Lean production”.
The ProManagement module can be precisely adapted to meet the specific requirements of the individual department within the company, says Steffen Meyer. – For us it is the assignment, or rather the number of hours it demands, that is the key point, says Henning Hansen. – Our foremen cannot keep track of the head count because our employees come to work at different hours.
Throughout the day and with ProManagement on hand they can easily determine whether they are over or undermanned, i.e. see whether they have sufficient hours available for production. This allows them to immediately take the necessary steps – either by resource levelling between departments or getting employees to start earlier/finish later than normally.
In ProMark we carry out hour and labour cost simulations on the basis of attendance profiles to compare available staff hours with required hours to carry out the production plan. This gives us the ability to make and continualy adjust our staff schedules to full fill the ever changing production plan. At the same time even foremen have exhaustive forecasts and overviews of labour cost.
Combines well with flexitime
In the delicatessen department which handles products such as liver pâté, herring, sliced meats, cheese, margarine, remoulade etc., ProMark has not only been implemented, it has also resulted in clear improvements. Henning Andersen, supervisor, says: – In our department where we have a 45-hour order cycle, we currently employ about 55 employees, of whom some have flexitime. One of my jobs – as it has always been – is to get each day to run as smoothly as possible, i.e. optimise the personnel or the number of hours we have available in relation to the volume of goods we need to send out. We want to be finished by clocking-out time – but not before as that just results in empty waiting time.
The fresh-food centre’s SPC system (Storage Process Control) states how many products need to pass through the system and it also states the number of hours required. Henning Andersen can then immediately compare this with the number of hours the ProManagement system says are available.
– On this basis I can see early on in the day whether I can meet requests by employees to use their flexi-time and leave at midday for example or whether I should perhaps borrow employees from another department.
- ProManagement has resulted in unbelievably good data discipline and this is important from the point of view of our budgets. At the same time, om can definitely rely on the different number of hours stated. Previously we had long lists which we used for planning, but now this entire process has been made far simpler.
Waiting time reduced
It has obviously taken time to set up ProMark, but generally speaking we are very close to what is optimal. And in any case we have become considerably better at finishing close to knocking-off time with the savings this gives, says Henning Andersen, who also says that the number of hours of waiting time per week has now been reduced to 30 hours, roughly corresponding to the delicatessen department having cleared their tables five minutes before the end of the day’s work.
Coop Danmark A/S, Denmark’s largest retail business with an annual turnover of approx. DKK 40 billion, has ten storage facilities (fresh foods, dry foods and non-food) in Denmark which all use the ProMark system.
Dispatch to over 700 shops
The 28,000 square metre fresh-food terminal in Hasselager supplies Coop Denmark shops in Jutland and on Funen with fruit and vegetables which is the largest product group, with dairy products apart from milk which is distributed directly from Arla Foods, with delicatessen and with fresh meat to the smallest shops.
– We deliver goods for a total of 715 shops, who receive deliveries between three and six times a week. We have approx. 500 routes or departures a week, distributed on six days, and this totals 20,000-25,000 kilometres each day, states Henning Hansen. – For instance, during just one week we sent off 23,000 pallets, corresponding to 600,000 parcels or 12.6 mill. litres.
Hasselager Fresh-food terminal has 330 permanent employees and 130 substitutes to handle this amount of goods, and they man the terminal from Sunday noon till Saturday evening on day, evening and night shifts.
Published December 4, 2006
