Enhanced Capabilities are Part of Major DLx® Labor 2006.1 Product Release
Which Delivers a Whole New Level of User Interaction and Advanced Functionality
Milwaukee, WI – RedPrairie Corporation, the world’s fastest growing supply chain company, announced today at RedShift 2006, its annual user conference and logistics industry summit, the availability of advanced labor demand planning capabilities for improved workforce utilization, and the industry’s first Employee Report Card. These features are two of the many enhancements to RedPrairie’s leading Workforce Performance Management suite, including deployment of RedPrairie’s new suite-wide, intuitive user interaction interface, contained in the 2006.1 DLx® Labor product release.
Says John Jazwiec, RedPrairie Company Leader, “Succeeding in today’s consumer-driven supply networks requires agility in distribution processes and technology unheard of just a few years ago. Companies must be able to respond immediately to customer demand by profitably scheduling and allocating the right resources (people, products and equipment) in the right place at the right time. The combined strategic and tactical labor demand planning capabilities in the 2006.1 release ensure workforce utilization is both demand-agile and optimized.”
The 2006.1 release has unique two-level demand planning functionality. A strategic planning tool enables long term resource planning based on historical patterns, seasonality and demand signals. It solves the challenge of establishing appropriate base staffing levels that are neither too high, causing increased non-productive time and poor utilization, or too low, which necessitates stop-gap measures such as overtime and temporary help.
The tactical planning and scheduling tool enables efficient resource deployment at the start of a day or shift and proactive redeployment during the working day as requirements change. This ensures the right number of workers with the right skills are available as order streams dictate to perform all tasks, including special packaging and value-added services.
Another unique feature of the demand planning functionality is an internal process dependency mapping capability which compensates for the fact enterprise demand planning and manufacturing systems only focus on product, not the impact on human resources in the distribution center. RedPrairie’s labor demand planning function uses a rules-based approach to translate demand signals and manufacturing schedules into specific workforce requirements.
Explains David Erickson, RedPrairie Development Leader for Workforce Performance Management, “An ERP demand planning application, for example, may know there is an inbound truck with 400 cases of product due tomorrow morning, but it has no idea what work this causes once it arrives at the DC. The mapping tool might predict 10 percent of this type of load will be diverted to QC, 40 percent will be cross-docked to stores and the remainder will be put away in bulk storage or pick faces. It will then use this information to calculate staffing requirements in each of these areas. This makes workforce planning more consistent and accurate while relieving supervisors of the need to manually allocate resources across functions.”
The 2006.1 release also offers a first-of-its-kind Employee Report Card that provides a balanced scorecard of worker performance. Most labor management applications report strictly on performance against job productivity goals. They fail to consider important factors such as indirect time, quality, attendance and safety that define worker effectiveness. The Employee Report Card combines all of these factors into a single view of worker performance, enabling supervisors to more easily track and better coach workers in all areas effecting the quality and effectiveness of operations.
Comments Paul Wolf, RedPrairie Vice President of Workforce Performance Management, “Traditional methods of ‘cracking the whip’ to spur productivity are no longer effective. Too often they result in quality and safety problems that more than offset the gains in throughput. Workers today need to be taught the proper method for performing each task, and then can be coached by supervisors when performance falls outside of the bounds along any of these dimensions. The Employee Report Card enables supervisors to readily provide this coaching and thus becomes an effective agent of change management.”
The 2006.1 release is currently being demonstrated to existing and prospective customers at RedShift 2006 in Tucson, AZ. It will be available for general release on June 15, 2006.
About RedPrairie Corporation
RedPrairie is the world’s fastest growing supply chain solutions company. RedPrairie’s success lies in its revolutionary ability to address companies’ consumer-driven supply chain challenges – end-to-end – providing competitive advantage and the most efficient supply chain systems in the world.
RedPrairie’s entire integrated suite of end-to-end (E2eTM) solutions utilize consistent thin client screens and is built upon a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that has been developed over the past 10 years and implemented in hundreds of Fortune 100 company sites around the world.
With 20-plus global service sites and standard service methods that have been validated over the last 30 years, RedPrairie provides unparalleled service and support.
For additional information, call 1.877.733.7724, or access http://www.RedPrairie.com.
