VF Jeanswear Commits to Rebuilding Distribution Center After Tornado

The tornados in spring of 2011 tore a path of destruction through many parts of the mid-south, including VF Jeanswear’s Hackleburg, AL distribution center. Famous throughout VF Corp. for its low cost, and high service levels, this jeanswear warehouse was an optimal blend of novel material handling equipment applications, highly customized systems support, and long-running labor management program that has been part of the culture and motivating the workforce for decades.

VFJ moved quickly to take care of its employees while it evaluated a number of possible options from using facilities at other VF coalitions to outsourcing to a third party logisitics provider. But with Hackelburg’s unique history, long standing reputation as a high-performing warehouse, and the needs of its major retail accounts, it decided to rebuild in Hackleburg. XCD is fortunate to help this icon of American jeans (with brands like Lee, Wrangler, Nautica and others) navigate this important journey forward.

Take a look at the ABC News clip of this all-American story.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/bringing-america-back-wrangler-rebuilds-tornado/story?id=14826097

Posted on October 31, 2012

XCD and GoalPost Create Alliance for Best-in-Class Labor Management

XCD Performance Consulting, provider of AMP Workforce Motivation™ labor management services and GoalPost labor management system; announce partnership to deploy long-lasting performance improvement programs for retail, consumer products, life sciences, third-party logistics, and other labor-intensive markets.

While labor management systems are surging in popularity for their value in focusing and improving labor productivity, few are used outside of basic direct labor operations and fail to create a far‐reaching performance‐focused work culture. Using AMP with GoalPost’s strong reporting and performance coaching features, managers master the fundamentals of labor management, and learn they can extend incentive coverage, and set performance goals for complex jobs like indirect, support, thought‐intensive functions and others traditionally viewed as out of bounds with labor management software and engineered labor standards.

GoalPost has some of the strongest performance coaching tools on the market, supports a variety of incentive schemes, and works seamlessly our AMP Rewards on-line point rewards program.

Posted on October 31, 2012

5 Tips for Selecting a Labor Management System

As supply chain operations continue to expand and increase in complexity, labor management systems (LMS) have evolved to be increasingly powerful enablers for elevating a productive workforce. The core functionality of LMS is still quite powerful - software that links engineered labor standards with production data to calculate and report on employee performance. Today however, these systems are being deployed to support more advanced challenges such as workforce planning, scheduling, and analyzing workloads and network performance; as well as being the heart of employee motivation programs like incentive pay or recognition rewards. As a result, this leaves executives with the challenge of finding the right solution to meet the specific needs of their organizations.

Here are five tips for understanding some of the newer features of labor management systems:

1. Out-of-the-Box Performance Reporting - You would think this is obvious since the ultimate purpose of an LMS is to report information. Surprisingly, there are some big differences. Look for standard reports that are chock-full with information. Imagine taking an eraser to all the non-data ink on a report – if you are erasing mostly lines, boxes, shading and redundent lists and there is scarce information left, you may be forced to go to multiple report views or worse, have to use a report writing application just to get to the basics.

2. Ease of LMS Integration - No LMS can run completely integrated to a host business system or WMS (warehouse management system). There are always some data that need to be manually added. Look for standard integration tools, a track record of successful integrations, and how elegantly the manual entry interface is constructed.

3. Workload Planning - A benefit of having engineered standards across operations is the ability to play ‘what-if’ scenarios. Will I have enough staff to get the work finished? How many hours of overtime will this program launch take? Workload planning features help improve customer service levels and minimize surprise overtime and other avoidable costs.

4. Workforce Scheduling - What if my top performers are out sick? Who can I back-fill into this position? Who is qualified? What happens to overall output if I move staff around for cross-training? These questions can be addressed with person-specific scheduling.

5. Social Networking - A new feature recently introduced by Manhattan Associates. The idea is to blend the rich data intensity of the LMS with an internal social network to more collaboratively solve performance, staffing and scheduling problems. We’ll have more thoughts on this feature in an upcoming post.

Whether you are new to labor management or are an experienced practitioner, the LMS market continues to evolve and address the growing demand for managing a valuable workforce.

Posted on October 31, 2012