The right solution

A leading American furniture store, Conn’s HomePlus was looking for a solution that would help it increase labor productivity across its distribution centers. Over the last five years, it has shed over a third of its labor force and gained three warehouses in the process – Conn’s is a growing company. To make the most of its workforce, the company wanted a labor solution that would allow it to create and maintain labor standards; track performance against those standards in real time; leverage real-time visibility to drive site-level operations; and have a set of reports to enable pay-for-performance reviews and payout.

Conn’s faced challenges with time-consuming data pulls and a lack of visibility into real-time labor metrics. These data pulls were tedious and often resulted in historical, unusable data. The company struggled with tracking and managing productivity in real time. One key metric, Pieces per Hour (PPH), required extensive time to collect and view and still could only be viewed historically. Without real-time visibility, operations and employees did not have the opportunity to proactively course-correct to meet their established goals for performance. They needed a solution that would provide real-time insights into labor performance, productivity, and throughput to better manage employees and operations. For the solution to work for Conn’s, it also had to be easy to use, flexible, and provide complete visibility into operations in real time.

Pay-for Performance
The Rebus Intelligent Labor solution gives managers complete insight into the performance of their teams in real time. With the help of Rebus, Conn’s was able to get productivity and performance data on each of its operators in real time, helping them manage their workload better. Based on this, Conn’s implemented a pay-for-performance system that rewarded high performers with bonus payouts, conditional on them exceeding pre-set goals in productivity, performance and utilization.

Key Benefits:
Improved Productivity: This was a big win for Conn’s. Before implementing Intelli¬gent Labor, management was unable to track and improve its PPH, a productivity metric, during low volume periods. However, by gain¬ing visibility into each operator’s performance and putting an incentive structure in place, Conn’s could monitor, track and improve pro¬ductivity even during times of low volume.

Increased Employee Engagement: Implementing the Intelligent Labor solution to build out a pay-for-performance program made employees more aware of their progress and excited about their work. Management noted that from the program’s launch, employees actively sought out their leaders to understand their performance and learn how they can do better—creating a feedback loop that managers could use to increase performance, engagement, and satisfaction.

Reduced Safety Incidents, Risks: The best part of small changes is that they are addictive. Management took the program one step further and tied the bonus payout to performance on other metrics that it was trying to improve. This was a simple, yet effective way that the team could reduce the number of safety incidents and absenteeism, as well as change employee behavior while rewarding good work.

Results:
Improved Performance: When Conn’s kickstarted the pay-for-performance program, Rebus’ measurements of employee perfor¬mance was around 89 percent for the month, but in three months of going live, the perfor¬mance had reached 98 percent – a ten percent increase in five months.

Increased Productivity: Historically when volumes decrease, productivity decreases as well. However, when volume decreased by 13 percent in the first month Rebus went live, productivity increased by two percent instead of decreasing as it historically did. The second month following that, volume spiked up 44 percent, and productivity increased by 25 percent. With the help of Rebus, teams were able to increase productivity regardless of their volume.

By installing Rebus, Conn’s was able to directly increase the productivity of its workforce, increase employee satisfaction and reduce costs. As a labor shortage continues to squeeze distribution centers across the world, hiring and retaining talent is a top priority in the warehousing world. The applications for real-time warehouse visibility are unlimited.

Rebus
Rebus is a unified platform that provides real-time visibility into the warehouse for distribution teams who need access to make point-in-time decisions about their warehouse operations, labor management, and inventory. Unlike other visibility solutions that focus on more readily available data from trucks and rail, The Rebus Platform focuses on the heart of the supply chain—the warehouse. By connecting disparate systems across the distribution network, logistics professionals have unparalleled access to view and manage their warehouse like never before.
https://www.conns.com/