Productivity, productivity is one of those all-encompassing words in our industry, do we really understand it? I\u2019m Marty with Warehouse and Operations as a Career and I thought we\u2019d talk about productivity a little today! One of our listeners is so close to getting his next level of pay or incentive, just so close. It appears his Supervisor pulled him aside last week and kind of gave him a verbal that it\u2019s easy to see he\u2019s working hard and doing a great job, but his numbers have to come up. I think we\u2019d all wonder what that meant if we\u2019d had that talk with our management. Am I going to lose any incentives, or have to step down a pay stage or am I going to lose my job even?
\nSo, what I\u2019ve been able to understand is this Order Selector has been working for his company for 6 weeks. His training or working with a trainer was for 2 weeks and he\u2019s been on his own for right at 4 weeks now. Usually an order selector, at this facility, is at xxx cases per hour by the 4th week, and our gentleman is about 55 cases and hour behind that quota. He states that he\u2019s on time every day, actually comes in about 15 minutes early for his shift and that he has not missed a single day or left early even once. His question for WAOC is how can I go faster?
\nWell, going faster is not necessarily how an Order Selector pulls more cases an hour. First let\u2019s think about what 55 cases an hour is, that\u2019s less than 1 more case per minute pulled. A minute is a long time when you actually time it out. You can walk your entire aisle in much less than a minute. Remember time is what an order selector is dealing with, not case quantities. You\u2019ve heard a couple of our guest, selection trainers themselves, explain to us how order selection is a mental game. Of course, we have to work hard, but we have to work smart too. Across an 8 hour shift we\u2019re going to need to pull 440 more cases, depending on where your working that could be as little as two more batches or pulls. I\u2019m talking like that\u2019s a simple task, I don\u2019t mean it to sound that way, but it\u2019s kind of that simple when we break it down. A few of the things we have to pay attention too are, lets see, anything that we allow our human nature side to take over. Maybe like running to the restroom, did we go outside of our breaktime, think about it, that\u2019ll take us several minutes a least. We park our equipment, we\u2019ll have to walk to the restroom or breakroom, maybe have to take off our wrist mount or speech unit, maybe our PPE\u2019s or freezer suit and then do everything in reverse to get started again. That\u2019s time we weren\u2019t selecting! After our start up meeting we\u2019re we the first one grabbing our pallets and into the aisles? Or did we talk with our friend for just a minute or two. When everyone was backed up in aisle A did, we stay focused, maybe scan through our batch and plan ahead, thinking of where we could utilize a cross aisle to reduce our travel time or did we join in on the conversation regarding someone\u2019s weekend or evening? Remember, if we\u2019re not selecting x number of cases a minute, we\u2019re falling behind time wise, we never want to drive half way down an aisle without stopping to get a case. If we have one case to pull close to an end cap, and we don\u2019t have anything else in that aisle it\u2019s always going to be better to just hustle over and grab that case than drive all the way down an aisle and not grab any cases or just 1 case. By skipping an aisle, and planning ahead, we just saved a few minutes of our hour. Travel time is wasted time in our field, we have to save it anytime we can. Its important we plan out our moves when we\u2019re dropping off or staging our finished batches up by the doors. We\u2019ll need to position them correctly, especially if we\u2019re the one responsible for wrapping them, we\u2019ll want to be able to get in between them quickly and efficiently. We need to get right over to the pallet area, grab a new set,