The Future of Manufacturing and Logistics

Continuous Improvement

Explore how leveraging the Veryable solution helps Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, and Lean leaders more effectively reach their objectives

Your Priorities & Objectives

As an Operational Excellence, Continuous Improvement, or Lean leader, you're responsible for identifying, implementing, and sustaining strategies and processes that improve efficiency and productivity.  There must be direct outcomes that improve operational performance, and those improvements must flow through to the ledger in the form of incremental revenue or reduced costs – both of which will improve margins.  

Here are a few areas of focus that are critical to success in this role:

  • Strategy Development and Deployment: You must develop a plan that helps the business reach its long-term goals by assessing the internal/external environments, and breaking it down into measurable and manageable steps. Once those milestones are sequenced, you must execute that plan by prioritizing efforts, assigning the resources, launching the technologies, and developing the tools to get there.  Change management is critical in keeping everyone aligned, communicating progress, and solving problems.
  • Project and Program Management: Transformation happens through the successful execution of a series of projects that build upon themselves.  You will need to know how manage a single project from beginning to end that delivers a specific result.  Depending on the scope of the transformation, size of the team, and timeline to deliver, there may require program level management of multiple projects in parallel, with interdependencies, and shared resources.  Sustaining the results at each step is critical to reduce rework and hold commitments.
  • Data Analytics: Accessing and understanding data is important in knowing what the current state looks like, where the opportunities are, and helping prioritize what to focus on. This same data will allow you measure the effectiveness and magnitude of those improvements from the baseline.  Data can be time consuming when looking at it across multiple platforms, data sources, and time periods. Linking these can enable real time understanding and action.  
  • KPI/Financial Acumen: This is where improvement is proven.  Without hard results it is impossible to quantify the impact of the “before” vs the “after”, defend the changes, or capitalize on the improved results.  This is important for summarizing improvements to leadership, communicating service levels or lead time reductions for Sales teams to use, or capturing cost savings with finance to reinvest.  The efforts should be visible on the KPI boards and they should also flow through on the P&L.  

The Veryable Solution

Veryable’s On-Demand Labor Marketplace

Labor will directly or indirectly impact every aspect of your operational performance.  It is also one of the largest expenses on your P&L.  Working to eliminate labor waste (having too much, or not enough) in real-time will allow you to move the needle both operationally and financially.

Leveraging Veryable’s On-Demand Labor Marketplace to build a labor pool will enable your team to scale labor up and down in real-time and in lock step with actual daily demand. Having this capability across all areas, all work centers, and all shifts will give your operations at least 3x greater agility.  Using this when you need it, and only when you need it will help you drive out excessive overtime costs and poor service during high demand periods and lost productivity during low demand periods. Additionally, by matching headcount to demand on a daily basis, you’ll be able to maintain a lower more constant cost per unit.

Veryable's Workforce Management Tool (WFM)

In order to meet ever-changing demands, your operation needs to be agile - using spreadsheets with siloed information won’t cut it. The result of relying on “the way things have always been done” is missed deadlines and inflated costs. Workforce Management brings all your information into one place, seamlessly integrating with your Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Warehouse Management Systems (WMS). These integrations allow WFM to automatically create forecasts and schedules based on actual needs in real-time as well as provide your team with the ability to seamlessly make last minute changes. WFM can act as a standalone platform for your full-time employees, or it can complement and automate many of the decisions made in using Veryable's On-Demand Labor Marketplace.

What these tools enable for Operational Excellence / Continuous Improvement:

  • Strategy Development and Deployment: Veryable’s local operations team will help you develop the strategy that works for your business. Think of our team of operational strategists and technologists as an extension of your team.
  • Program and Project Management: With our depth of experience across manufacturing, distribution, and warehousing, there is little we haven’t already solved.  This expertise can be put to use for a single use case or more complex programs. Training, coaching, and progress pulsing is a part of our implementation.
  • Data Analytics: Use of our platforms will help you consolidate multiple systems into one, and give you access to your data with customizable dashboards, reporting, and market level intel.  Additionally, our operations intelligence and data analytics teams can help automate processes.
  • KPI / Financial Acumen: Whether you're just starting to track On-Time Delivery, or we're dealing with complicated net labor efficiency calculations, our team can help you start where you are.  We typically work alongside operations and finance teams to demonstrate savings and make sure they hit the bottom line.
  • Lean Center of Excellence: The Veryable team has many Lean Practitioners and Six Sigma Blackbelts, who have developed some of these tools and thought leadership to help businesses put this knowledge to use. Click here to visit our Lean Center of Excellence.
  • Thought Leadership: Learn best practices from Veryable's operations experts and business leaders from across our network by checking out our blog and searching across categories like: Productivity, Service Metrics, Lean Center of Excellence, "Creativity Over Capital", "Point of View", Operational Excellence, and Cost Reduction.

What You Can Accomplish

Leveraging Veryable's On-Demand Labor Marketplace to build a flexible extension of your full-time workforce and utilizing WFM to streamline the labor planning process makes it easier to reach your objectives in numerous ways

assembly line icon with clock to represent throughput
Address Production Outliers

Bringing in supplemental on-demand labor will allow your team to:
*Tackle stranded or aged orders
*Break work in process bubbles
*Recover from quality issues & material delays
*Eliminate past due backlog

Increase Throughput & Productivity

*Adding support in bottleneck areas means you can stop watering down the output of your skilled workers with non-critical tasks and allow these skilled workers to produce more

operational agility icon
Manage Demand Variation

* Flexing labor capacity daily helps you maintain short lead times
* Unlimited flexible capacity means you can accept new orders that would have previously constrained capacity
* With the ability to respond in real-time, you no longer have to staff to historical averages and hope for the best

labor cost reduction icon
Lower Operating Costs

* Having the ability to match headcount to demand on a daily basis means your company no longer will have to pay overtime during busier periods or pay workers to stand around during slow periods. With labor costs likely already being one of your largest expenses, reducing waste in this area will have drastic bottom line impacts

Case Studies

Stories From the Real World

Hear from our business users how Veryable has helped them achieve operational excellence

What Our Business Users Are Saying

“Since implementing Veryable, we were able to increase productivity by 28% and 3X our Quality Control, all while seeing a 15% reduction in labor costs as a percentage of sales”

JaNiece Cranmer

President, Scentsational Soaps & Candles

“Distribution Management has made significant investments in technology to support our same-day fulfillment strategy. Coupled with Veryable’s on-demand Marketplace, it allows us to solve for real-time capacity gaps that support our 99.98% on-time SLA."

Alex McCoy

Supply Chain Director, Distribution Management

“The technology-driven approach to flexible labor complements Wagner’s flexible warehousing model by giving us the ability to quickly adapt to changing needs in our warehouses, where we often share space, equipment and staff across various clients within one warehouse. We can now respond faster and more effectively than ever before.”

Joe Oliaro

CREO, Wagner Logistics

"Everything you know, is cost per order and we are able to keep that as minimal as we can With Veryable. With the peaks and valleys that we do see, we see a lot more valley than we do peaks, and it's very fast and very short durations of them. So being able to kind of throttle that headcount here has been just tremendous as far as savings."

Wilson Duke

Warehouse Director, Made In Cookware

"We can have people come in and do criteria checks. So we just teach them to use a couple of tools and show them what they need to measure. And that takes a lot of the weight off of our skilled full time employees... If they don't have to stop and do criteria checks on every part that comes out, then they're able to produce more parts in the machine."

Mickey Raynoha

Business Manager, Mack Tool & Engineering

"If we start the day at 7AM, and we realize that we don't have enough labor on first shift to get parts out the door, that means we need to try to reinforce second or third shift... traditionally you don't have those opportunities to bring in talent on a same day basis... we did it with Veryable the first time we tried it."

Jake Rupert

Head of HR, ADAC Automotive

Resources

Our Point of View

Explore our thought leadership blog for valuable insights.

September 6, 2023

Understanding the Hour-by-Hour Board: A Lean Tool for Efficiency

With its ability to provide real-time visibility, enhanced communication, and support data-driven decision-making, the HbH is an invaluable asset.
August 2, 2023

POV: Lean Leader - Any Part, Any Quantity, Anytime.

Adding integrated tools like Workforce management (WFM) and the Standard Work module allow you to optimize your operation no matter what comes your way
July 17, 2023

Sustaining the 6S Method: Tips for Long-Term Success

In this blog post, we will delve into the importance of sustaining the 6S method and provide you with tips to maintain the gains achieved

Getting Started With On-Demand Labor

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