The shift begins and questions abound
The shift is about to start, and each of the warehouse supervisors need to understand how their individual areas are doing before they go to meet their teams for their pre-shift huddle.
Each supervisor has a different focus across the warehouse from inbound receiving to outbound shipping and everywhere in-between. But they are all asking a similar question: “What am I walking into?”
- Did the prior shift complete all their cycle counts as planned?
- Are we running behind for the day on picking and fill rates?
- Does the incoming shift have the available labor and in the right roles to handle planned demand and inbound receiving?
- Are any current inventory issues impacting on time outbound shipments?
Today, answering those questions, along with other important ones, requires each supervisor to physically track down their counterpart from the departing shift and get a status update or wade through stacks of dated reports.
The result, at best, is a fragmented picture of current status. And that’s often considered a good procedure with typical warehousing software.
Meet the Warehouse Operations Agent
What if it didn’t need to be like that?
What if every manager and supervisor was met at the start of their shift with an agentic AI powered brief tailored specifically to their individual role within the warehouse?
A brief that pulled signals from across the warehouse to provide insights on pick and fill rates, cycle counts, inventory and associate productivity, space management and productivity, resource availability, demand and order status, and many more.
A brief that provided each supervisor with a clear, understandable picture of their area’s status at that exact moment. Along with explanations, context and recommendations for the supervisor to make actionable decisions going into the shift.
And what if that clarity was delivered directly to each supervisor’s mobile device or desktop?
Meet the Warehouse Operations Agent.
More than just an update
The Warehouse Operations Agent doesn’t just provide a status update going into the shift.
The agentic brief provides each supervisor with a root cause analysis of any issues found alongside recommended actions for them to approve and implement to keep the warehouse on track.
So, instead of doing the analysis to figure out the “why” and the “fix” on their own, the agentic brief can inform supervisors that:
- Picking performance is running behind due to inefficient product slotting and movements with a recommendation to re-slot the problem SKUs more efficiently
- Cycle counts are only being partially completed due to low tenure associates struggling with the cycle count’s complexity. And recommends moving higher tenure associates to accomplish the task
- On time fill rates are behind because of excess travel time and warehouse congestion. With an explanation identifying the specific work zones that need to be addressed and associates that may need additional training.
And the Warehouse Operations Agent provides these tailored updates continually during the workday as the WMS discovers problems to fix or opportunities to exploit.
The impact of clarity
What’s the real-world impact from that improved level of clarity:
- Upgraded leadership focus: Instead of wasting time piecing together a fragmented view of status at the start of the shift, the Warehouse Operations Agent provides every supervisor with updates and insights focused on achieving the shift goals.
- Improved throughput: By identifying operational root causes and presenting them alongside recommendations, actions can be taken faster to mitigate any picking shortfalls or exploit opportunities in near real time.
- Enhanced workload balance: While an Agent brief may be individually tailored, Agent recommendations consider activity across the warehouse keeping activity balanced to prevent operational bottlenecks and congestion during the shift.
- Improved labor productivity: With alerts that highlight gaps in worker performance Vs workload complexity, supervisors can swap in better trained resources during the shift to take up any slack and complete the shift’s work on time.
- Increased inventory productivity: Updates that call out missed inventory picks due to poor inventory accuracy or missed cycle counts that can be corrected by the current shift to improve inventory productivity.
