When warehouse managers are really angry, they don’t like to talk about it in public. Around 6 a.m., when a shipment doesn’t show up and thirty workers are stuck at an empty dock with nowhere to go, it usually comes. The work has already been paid for. The trucks are still not here. And no one in the building knew about it ahead of time.
That is exactly the kind of problem that Blue Yonder, a supply chain software company that is now a Panasonic subsidiary, has been trying to solve for years. Its Workforce Management platform is meant to do something that sounds easy but isn’t always done: match the people who work in a building with the work that needs to be done right now, before things go wrong.
The platform has the basics: planning, scheduling, tracking time and attendance, and managing shifts. It’s important to pay attention to how it links those functions to the rest of the supply chain, though. If a port delay pushes back an incoming shipment by eighteen hours, the system should pick up on that and change staffing plans accordingly, so a manager doesn’t have to call around or guess. This kind of integration might be more useful than the scheduling software itself.
The company Blue Yonder calls it a change from administrative HR to “operational synchronization.” That’s business speak, but the idea behind it makes sense. A lot of tools for workers are inside HR systems and can’t talk to software for managing warehouses. It’s helpful that Blue Yonder owns both sides because the staffing layer can see what the inventory layer already knows.
There’s also a mobile app—more than 500,000 people have downloaded it on Android, and it has a 4.9 rating, which shows that many people are really happy with it. From their phones, workers can see their pay stubs, change shifts, ask for time off, and look at their schedules. Self-service access like that is more important than it might seem, especially in fields with a lot of staff changes and odd hours. Seeing someone during their own week is a small thing that can have a big impact on whether they stay or not.
There is more to the story, though, than what the app reviews say. There have been reports of login loops, failed authentication, and a mobile experience that feels more like a web browser wrapper than a native app. In May, one reviewer called it “a blue button on my homescreen.” This kind of trouble is important to note because a platform for workers can only be useful if workers can access and use it.
On the business side, the platform uses machine learning to make demand predictions every fifteen minutes, taking into account past patterns, the weather, sales, and foot traffic. The scheduling engine then uses those predictions to make a schedule that takes into account skill needs, employee preferences, and limits on overtime. You don’t want to be overstaffed, which means paying people to stand around, or understaffed, which hurts customer trust and production goals in a sneaky way.
Blue Yonder’s own materials say that clients usually see a five to ten percent drop in labor costs and an increase in employee engagement of up to twenty-five percent. As with most vendor-cited statistics, those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. But the logic behind it still makes sense. Getting rid of wasteful scheduling and making things more predictable for workers tends to have the same effects across all fields.
Some people still think that workforce management software isn’t worth as much as the problems it solves. Everyone talks about how goods can be seen in the supply chain. Not as many people talk about labor supply chain visibility. Blue Yonder thinks that these two things can’t exist without each other; that you can’t run a busy store floor or an efficient distribution center without planning your people with the same level of care you plan your inventory. It’s still not clear if this integration works on a large scale. But it looks like the right way to go.
