Redesign Warehouse: Value Productivity and Pay or Lose
Warehouse Wage-War News
What’s driving this hourly-labor, news stream?
- Oct 2018: Amazon (which sets the bar) upped the ante for warehouse workers (and Delivery Partner drivers) to $15/hr. plus benefits. And, Bernie Sanders applauded!
- July 2019: AMZ announces a $700MM training budget to advance, self-selected warehouse workers to: better, technical-jobs, career paths.
Next, Pandemic-Christmas Season demand:
- Sept 15th: Uline – a catalog, packaging distributor – announces $23/hr. warehouse spots with a $6K signing bonus.
- Sept 17th: Walmart will pay $18 -21/hr. with a path to $30 for service teams at SuperCenters.
- October 1st: Hobby Lobby – an arts and crafts store chain – starts paying $17/hr. for retail clerks.
- October 7th : Lowe’s announces $100MM in bonuses for hourlies: 6th increase during the pandemic!
- UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. must join this seasonal fray.
Causes?
- A huge, on-going shift of consumers (and tradesmen) going to stores (and branch counters) to buy goods to now ordering on-line for direct delivery (in 1-day and then less from AMZ).
- New monster warehouses are good targets for unions. So, pay the most, to get and keep the best work ethic employees who don’t need unions.
- The productivity increase per worker from strategic effectiveness and automation more than pays for the high wages. Goal: pay 150% of the going job-niche wage to get 150 to 200% of the Gross Profit Dollars per Head plus perfect-service output.
Distributors!
To offer perfect service on web orders, you must have:
- Web-visible, accurate inventory
- Highest effective, local fill-rates
- 100% on-time shipment/delivery (even with random order surges).
These capabilities require:
- 95% cycle-count accuracy on top-100, most-picked SKUs
- 100% same-day receiving to boost fill-rates the next day
- Cross-trained employees to do all tasks perfectly and inter-changeably.
- Team-tackling of order surges to insure on-time shipment with zero errors.
Will you pay up to get and keep top 5% work-ethic employees to stay in the game?
How Do You Migrate From Average -Pay, Talent, Service, Productivity – To Outstanding?
Three, free resources:
- My 12 webinar series . Learn how to grow strategic, order-size-economics and productivity.
- My “Core Renewal Roadmap”.
- My YouTube playlist #5 and most narrowly video-clips 64 to 72 .
And/Or, be in touch with questions: [email protected]