Precision in Practice: Harnessing AI for Smarter Resource Allocation
Our mission is to partner with businesses to bring together relevant labour and operational data, from across their organisation as well as external market data in order to allocate and manage labour in the most efficient way possible; maximising margins, improving customer service and fine-tuning pricing models for stronger margin yields.
The Labour Paradox
Why it matters
- The root causes of this problem often include:
- Allocation of labour based on intuition or static levels, regardless of fluctuations in planned activity volume.
- Lack of data-driven understanding regarding the time and effort required to complete tasks or the cost of service.
- Limited visibility of real-time labour performance and the ability to identify anomalies due IT infrastructure’s siloed data.
in labour allocation, which can’t be accurately planned or projected without the right data”
- Outcomes of lack of precision in labour management
- Reduced margins
- Delivery bottlenecks
- Penalties on missed KPIs
- Overloaded staff
From Insights to Action: How AI Can Transform Resourcing Decision-Making
- What if labour management scenarios and resourcing levels could be modelled and tested before they were enacted?
AI can present outcomes responding to real-time market conditions, providing valuable insights, enabling operational teams to make timely and informed decisions that maximise profitability without impacting customer service.
- More testing, less guessing
Our team can create a digital twin of the operational aspects of your business. These “twins” are fed vast amounts of your core system data from various systems-of-record to be processed in real-time. The AI, analytics and machine learning algorithms then utilise the data to provide deep insights of your operations to your managers. This gives your team a digital environment to model, test, tweak and identify the optimal allocation of labour based on real-time demand, rosters, time/cost to serve, and Customer SLAs.
With tools that enable visibility across the outcomes of various scenarios, your business can identify and implement precise labour resourcing to optimise costs, enhance customer service, increase productivity and prevent revenue loss in real-time, in response to real market conditions. Even small adjustments, such as reducing 15 minutes of overtime per shift, representing a 3% reduction in labour costs, per operator, when delivered at scale can lead to significant optimised costs.
On a labour cost of $150 million, that’s $4.5 million”
Fine-Tuning Resourcing Decision-Making with AI-Enabled Insights
- Steps for leveraging AI’s capabilities examine, test and optimise resourcing scenarios:
- 1. Real-time performance monitoring:
- Financial metrics, such as revenue, labour costs, profitability, cost to serve
- Operational metrics, such as productivity, utilisation, idle time, non-billable activities
- 2. Labour headcount planning
Utilising various demand forecast models, current orders and planned activity, and a knowledge base of time to serve/per task that we develop using your activity data we can outline optimal resourcing recommendations for tomorrow, next week, next quarter and the next financial year.
The headcount recommendation is backed by actual data, with a forecast of predicted revenue and margins, supporting your HR recruitment drives and Finance budgeting activities.
Furthermore, the short-term and medium-term forecast allows you to plan leave (annual leave and RDOs) alongside your casual labour pool. These forecasts are constantly updated with real-time data in response to changes in volumes and customer trading activity.
- 3. Task Allocation:
- 4. Anomaly Analysis in Real-Time:
Getting there begins with developing and implementing a custom data strategy
Over the last decade, businesses have put effort into harvesting and aggregating their data from their core systems to inform both high-level strategy and operational decision-making, however uncoordinated data or data from disparate systems that are not explicitly related are hard to work with and labour-intensive to curate into forms that can be analysed.
So for reasons including in-house skillset, lack of dedicated resources and budget, the ‘reinventing the wheel’ data strategy often fails to succeed. Likewise, those who have been approached by AI vendors with little understanding of your sector’s unique challenges and operating climate have been fed access to data pipelines that fail to paint the whole picture of your operating conditions.
In contrast, our 90-day programme is geared to provide your team with predictive analytics and business insights that are not only current, but also strategically curated for maximum business relevance. We achieve this by swiftly identifying and integrating specific data sources from internal systems and external sources into a single platform intelligently categorising and organising data into relevant, actionable insights, including:
- Payroll, rostering and attendance systems;
- Order management and activity tracking systems such as a WMS, TMS and Telematics devices
- ERP systems such as SAP S/4HANA
- POS and eCommence platforms.
With our specific expertise and knowledge of the labour sector, we also integrate from selected external data sources such as traffic, weather, shipping schedules, to create a custom digital twin of your operations.
- Warehousing – carton count, weight and DIMS, forklift travel time and pallet storage locations, customer SLAs, fatigue .
- Transport – travel time, freight weight, trailer combinations, permitted routes, pick-up/delivery times, on-site waiting times, fatigue .
- Business-specific productivity KPIs – unpack time targets, pallet movements/hr, trips/shift etc.
- Demand forecast models to look at the short, medium and long-term demand at an activity and weekly leve
- Optimisation models to recommend the optimal supply of labour for these time horizons
- Anomaly detection algorithms to identify issues in real-time.
Partner with AI experts who have walked in your shoes
Don’t walk the AI journey on your own. Our experienced team has held senior operational roles in major enterprises like yours, so we understand how to unlock the full spectrum of benefits that AI can bring to your operations.
Our skills lie in our understanding of business as well as our understanding of AI. Our AI applications are going to be most relevant to your team. We know what business data to harvest for maximum impact, so you don’t have to wade blindly through an endless sea of possibilities.
We’ve created a methodology to deliver your business a comprehensive solution for transforming, processing, and analysing data tailored to your specific needs. And we’ve finetuned our process to be as lean and efficient as possible, so you can start seeing impact sooner, with minimal disruptions to your day-to-day. When combined with delivery by our team’s in-depth, hands-on knowledge gained working within your sector, we can deliver capability at speed, while ensuring the optimisations we strive for together are relevant, applicable, and achievable for your business.
Achieve tangible, relevant outcomes
- Map trucks, delivery locations, warehouses, stores, shifts, rosters together in one platform
- Optimise labour planning and allocation in real-time, from warehouse to truck
- Build flexible, future-proofed labour plans that can be adjusted to meet shifting demand
- Add rigour and assurance to labour management by mapping decisions back to data source systems to prevent entropy, and feeding decisions into an AI/ML model to close the feedback loop, objectively improving business operations
- Receive proactive alerts that flag risks such as shortage/over-resourcing of labour, risk of SLA breach with recommended mitigating actions
- Collaborate on a single source of truth, putting an end to conflicting labour management strategies.
- Improved visibility over the workforce, assets, roles and tasks
- Reduced labour cost and wastage
- Improved customer service and delivery
- Increased impartiality via objective precision-based decision-making
- Integrated demand forecasting, labour management and allocation
- Decrease reaction time in the face of disruptions and shifting market trends
- Optimised labour allocation for improved productivity, utilisation and profitability
- Reduced idle time, revenue lower stockout rates, maximised transactability
- Improved customer satisfaction and retention
- Reduced pressure on staff workloads