DC Velocity - June 2013

lean practices to a warehouse or DC: If lean analysis shows that less labor is required for specific tasks, how do you get employees to support those changes? And is it necessary to have a full-blown lean program already in place, or is it possible to apply selected aspects of it to cut warehouse labor costs?

All of the experts interviewed for this article agreed on three things in regard to employee buy-in. First, reducing head-count should never be the goal of a lean initiative, and no full-time employee should ever be laid off because of one. Instead, warehouses and DCs can adjust their use of temporary labor, wait for staffing levels to drop through normal attrition, or reassign associates to open positions.

Second, contributions from the people who actually do the work are an integral part of any lean initiative. They know what actually happens, and they are in the best position to identify waste and implement improvements. Their active participation in a multilevel team is a critical success factor and will also encourage them to accept change.

And third, honest communication about
the expected benefits for them, their
employer, and their customers is impor-
tant. While the benefits for the employer
may be obvious, associates need to know
that lean warehouse initiatives have per-
sonal benefits for them: a cleaner, safer
workplace; less physical stress and time
pressure; recognition for their ideas and
achievements; and often, more business
and therefore, greater job security and
opportunities for promotion. Says Jacobs:
“The excellence of a project equals the
quality of the solution times the accept-
ance of that solution.”
As for whether lean projects can be done
piecemeal or should only be implemented
as part of a comprehensive companywide
initiative, all agree that the latter is prefer-
able by far. Lean is and should be a perva-
sive and permanent culture—not a limit-
ed-time project—that works for every-
body at every level, Martichenko argues.

Menlo’s Sroka agrees, and says that Menlo “treats Lean as part of our DNA.” Lean is a systematic approach, and its principles are most effective when tied to an

overall system, he says. “You could pick and choose and apply certain aspects, but there’s the question of sustainability over the long term,” he adds. Without the commitment to continuous improvement and all that it entails, things will eventually stall and revert to less efficient, more costly practices.

LABOR AS VALUE CREATOR

Lean is not easy to implement, but when done properly, it can transform a company’s culture, not to mention the way a warehouse or DC operates. “Managers make decisions based on experience, but Lean takes you to places they hadn’t thought of,” Jacobs says.

But any warehouse or DC that
tries to use lean principles solely to
cut labor costs will fail to achieve
the full benefits of the system. “Lean
views labor not as a commodity but
as something that has value,” Wilusz
says. “It allows you to do amazing
things beyond just lowering costs;
you can get more value from labor
so that you can do more for your
customers.”
Ultimately, Sroka says, a systemat-
ic approach to Lean will reveal that
there’s no perfect warehouse and
that every operation has room for
continuous improvement. “The
more experience you gain and the
more you learn to see waste, the
more you will see opportunities to
make improvements,” he says. ;

Editor’s note: There are many excellent sources of information about Lean both in print and online, and many highly trained consultants who can help companies follow a lean path. A source we turned to frequently for this article was the Lean Enterprise Institute’s website ( www.lean.org) and its illustrated glossary, “Lean Lexicon.”