Order Picking Error in Warehouse

@zellley
Blaming the operator is a tried and true reason given but not well documented with evidence. An FMEA based on opinion won’t get you much. I rarely blame the operators since you will 1. have to convince the operators to stop having a bad attitude with little success and 2. operators will be there long after your project is over.

Unless you have sabotage or outright destructive behaviors, systems that people work in are the reason, not the people.

A Deming quote: I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this:
94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management)
6% special
Often quoted as “The system is responsible for 94% of problems” or “Management is responsible for 94% of the problems”

Source: curiouscat.com/deming/demingquotes.cfm

If you are at 5.7, what is the cost saving to the business by reaching 5.9?

If your errors are down to warehouse staff put away/picking errors, this comes down to how you can get more out of your staff. I’m not a fan of league tables when there is no fincanial benifit to the employee’s, mainly as it just leads to bad feelings between staff and management as they can feel that their “Bad work” is being put on display, the way i like to do it is create a bit of compeition based on weekly/monthly/yearly figures some spot prizes most improved month on month etc, with prize’s

the reason i asked the first question is you will have to make a case for spending extra money on this league, but if the money spent is a lot less that hitting your 5.9 figure then it should be a no brianer!!

Just make sure that the prizes are chunky enough to make people work for them, Also whatever you do and i can not stress this enough is do not make this league or the results of the reason you discpline staff you will not get buy in. You can monitor the results and make fact based decisions on changing staff or retraining them with the info you get

hope this helps

@Philip – Yes, we already have incentives in place, is just that I am also thinking if it’s time that we relook at the monetary value, as the value is being ‘stagnant’ for more than 5 years. I fully agree on the “buying-in” logic. This is also what I dread about 6 sigma. Data are easily crunched. but when it comes to people, oh well, it takes time and alot of effort.

@Mike
Ok, I will show the calculations once I get back to work on Monday.

@Bill
Yes, i just did a mini group discussion on Friday. The key is involvement.
I sensed that there is some discontentment among a few people, so ok, no hard approaches.

How would you analyse your data – as in count of errors or per EPM (wrong product errors divide by lines picked)?
because if EPM – the data is continuous, if count of errors, the data is discrete. and this will determine what kind of distribution etc. and in turn affects my analysis. anyone has an insight on this?

I been involved in a few similar situations. Its important not to put blame on the employees. Most likely there is a problem with the picking process. I had a situation where there were many picking errors and the products weren’t going out to the customer fast enough. I actually put a Kaizen together and brought in their in house IT staff to help come up with new ideas to make the process more efficient using current technology. The new process now involves finger scanners and iPods with a new warehouse management Intranet application running on the iPod. Needless to say the orders have been flying out the door and picking errors are down considerably. The point in this story is to involve every body in trying to figure a better process and not to blame your employees for a dis-functional process.

Philip Godkin, do you have a mathematical formula for this? I’m trying to find a formula that calculates how many times that are most effective for our picker to count full deliveries.

Today our picker count a full delivery for each type of telecommunication tower. For our current project that is 4 full deliveries being checked. However, we have an counting error of missing pieces of 0,5% today, and we want to calculate the amount of counts that should be done in order to have this percentage closest to zero as possible.