Migrating Engineered Labor Standards from one Labor Management System to another can be daunting.   Even some of the most experienced and knowledgeable Engineered Labor Standards users misunderstand the complexity of moving Engineered Labor Standards from one Labor Management System to another.  Engineered Labor Standards are very sensitive to changes in Warehouse Management System and the Labor Management System.  One cannot simply port time values from one system to another to achieve accurate labor standards on the new system.

Often a new WMS will incorporate changes in order processing and/or provide for changes in the operational processes.  Examples:

  1. If the system processes orders differently resulting in different pick sequences within the physical selection process, the labor standards may need to change as pick sequence changes result in a differing effort for selectors to build pallets.
  2. If the system now provides for forklift interleaving (combining putaway and replenishment work), physical travel characteristics will change and the equipment speeds in the LMS must change.

A new LMS may incorporate changes travel path calculation or additional functionality to provide improved labor standard accuracy.  Examples:

  1. No LMS perfectly mimics the actual travel speed and path in the physical warehouse.  Consequently the travel speeds must be adjusted for this variation.  If the new LMS changes the travel path calculation, the adjusted travel speeds from the previous LMS will not be accurate.
  2. An LMS that provides for a single pallet handling time for a selector may have new functionality that provides pallet handling based on the pallet cube allowing one to provide a more accurate representation of the pallet wrapping times.  In this case the original pallet handling time will not accurately support the new functionality.

The bottomline:  When moving from one WMS and/or LMS to another, moving data is not likely to result in accurate Engineered Labor Standards on the new system.  One should always allow for additional resources to audit the new standards and if found to be inaccurate make the appropriate remediation.

Contact us at Aries Consulting LLC, we can guide your company through this process.