Why doesn't my WMS give me the labour reporting I need?
A WMS is built to direct and record the work, rather than to measure how the paid hours were used. Labour reporting needs three things it doesn't hold: the paid hours in the clocking system, the work it never records and a fair time for each task. The WMS is doing its job; the answer sits across several systems.
What a WMS is there to do
A warehouse management system tells people where to receive, put away, replenish and pick, then records each task as it's done. It does that well, which is why most warehouses would stop without it. Its reports come from those records: orders and lines shipped, picks by location, stock moves and the time each scanned task took.
Labour reporting asks a different question. You want to know how the hours you paid for were used, how well the work went once people got to it and where the time went when they didn't. The WMS holds part of that answer at most, because the rest was never its job.
The three things labour reporting needs
- The paid hours. They sit in the clocking or time and attendance system, in payroll and in the agency's timesheets. Without them, any labour figure is a share of scanned time rather than of the time you paid for.
- The work the WMS never records. Replenishment done without a scan, unloading, housekeeping, training and the walk to the first task all take paid hours without reaching the WMS as a task. Leave them out and a busy shift reads as a quiet one.
- A fair time for each task. Picks an hour mean little until you know what a reasonable operator does on that route, in that zone, on that kind of order. That's an engineered standard. Where one exists, it usually lives in a spreadsheet or a separate labour management system.
On top of those sit your own rules: how the shifts and teams are set up, which client each piece of work is for and the service level on each kind of order. Much of that lives in people's heads or in a planning spreadsheet, rather than anywhere a report can reach.
Why the reports look the way they do
A WMS is usually configured at go-live by a project team whose job is to get the warehouse running on the day. The standard reports it ships with are written for every warehouse that runs that system, so they can't know the way yours is run.
What the business asks of the warehouse keeps moving after go-live: another client, a new channel, a tighter cut-off. The reports move when somebody pays for a change or the vendor ships a release. The space between the two opens up in every warehouse, whichever system it chose, which is why this is a question about the gap rather than about the WMS.
What actually changed to make any of this possible
One pick run, as the WMS saw it
In a third-party logistics warehouse we've worked in, one of the best pickers took 57 minutes over a pick run. The WMS recorded the run and its length, which is all it could see. What it couldn't show was that 24 of those minutes went on stock that wasn't where the system said it was.
That's 24 minutes out of 57, more than two minutes in every five spent looking rather than picking. Measured against a standard time, she'd have come out slow. The cause sat in the stock record rather than with her. Only the three things above, read together, would show it.
A best picker lost 24 minutes of 57 to stock that wasn't where the system said it was. None of it was recorded, so standard times alone would have marked her down
Getting the reporting without replacing the WMS
The answer is to read the systems together rather than ask one of them to do everything. That means the paid hours from the clocking system, the tasks from the WMS, the off-system work logged by supervisors, a fair time for each task and your own rules, all checked against each other before anybody reads a number.
There's more than one way to do that, from building it with your own data team to buying a labour management system, each with its own costs. Fettle does it by reading the systems you already run. Your rules go in during the first week on site. From then on, it shows how the paid hours were used, by zone, job and shift.