Capacity and Workforce Planning.
The Digital Twin of your warehouse in W2MO gives full transparency over capacity utilisation and enables more efficient workforce planning — strategically, tactically and in day-to-day operations.
Strategic and tactical planning — all the way into day-to-day operations.
Online productivity control, scenario calculations and demand-driven workforce deployment based on real order volume.
- Online load preview per department, team and shift — also on mobile devices — making time-specific and dynamic bottlenecks visible
- Scenario calculations to optimise working-time models and workforce deployment
- Demand-driven workforce planning based on current and planned orders
- Minimised organisational effort for reassignments
- Vacation planning based on expected order volume and resulting workload
Strategic Capacity Planning.
- Optimisation of working-time models, headcount and teams
- Recommendations for action in case of sudden demand changes
- Optimisation of buffer capacity during peak loads
- Scenario calculations, e.g. changes to working times and customer-order patterns, practical “mix” of permanent and temporary workers
- Budget planning
In strategic capacity planning the required workforce is determined, budgets are planned and different scenarios are evaluated. A true-to-scale model, customisable standard times and time studies allow realistic process times to be derived inside the Digital Twin. Based on the simulated warehouse tasks, the workforce needed for every process can be sized realistically. This makes it possible to define long-term which workforce setup and shift model is suitable in which situation. Peak loads can be simulated and, for example, a mix of permanent and temporary workers can be evaluated.
Mid-term Capacity Planning.
- Extrapolation of past scenarios and order pools to future periods
- Volume planning and application of alternative scenarios
- Automatic identification of efficiency to estimate future workforce demand
- Vacation planning in cooperation with administrative systems
- Shift planning
- Forecast of required workforce based on automatic scaling from comparable past weeks
Within mid-term planning the future workforce demand is estimated based on expected demand. The goal is to produce a forecast that is as accurate as possible from past insights. At the same time the expected efficiency is calculated automatically — taking projected sales volumes and order structures into account. From this, vacation planning can be derived from leave requests in upstream administrative systems. Approval then happens based on expected capacity requirements. The same approach is applied to predictive shift planning — shift structure and size are set for a mid-term horizon.
Operational Workforce Planning.
Online productivity control
- Bottleneck avoidance through continuous, real-time load assessment in the Digital Twin
- Optimisation of the available workload through automatic reassignment of workers between areas
- Considers current orders, warehouse occupancy, available headcount, reassignments, and the failure of system components
- On-time delivery by determining expected completion times of orders
- Re-prioritisation of orders and reassignment of staff when delay is imminent
- Balancing of workforce utilisation
A central element of operational workforce planning is the live load preview inside the Digital Twin. Based on current orders and short-term forecasts, the expected workload is simulated across the day. From this, workers are allocated to areas according to their skills. The expected completion time for every order is continuously monitored. If on-time delivery is at risk, the system can react in time with re-prioritisation and reassignment. When new circumstances arise — such as system outages — reassignment can take place at any time, including automatically. Continuous transparency over capacity utilisation and reduced idle resources translate into a productivity increase across the entire operation.
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