600 employees reskilled in just a few months

Operations and supply chain leaders view the adoption of automation technology, like robotic material handling as essential to their organization’s future success. Even factoring in maintenance costs, depreciation, and time to profitability, the cost makes sense when a company forecasts a significant increase in productivity. But without the proper support for employees using the tools, these types of investments often fall short of expectations and can even fail.

To be successful, many companies are realizing the need to retrain their existing workforces. With the right tools, you can provide your team with the support they need to master new skills faster and reduce their time to proficiency. Reskilling or upskilling are a necessary means for companies to improve team capabilities alongside the rapid digitalization of the workplace.

Outcomes:

• 600 employees reskilled in just a few months
• Increased efficiency to double the number of pallets packed/hour
• Rapid adoption of new technology with virtually no downtime
• Reduced travel waste & Improved pick rate

“Thanks to Acadia, employees view the role changes as personally beneficial – an opportunity to simplify work and learn new skills.” 

– Operational Excellence Manager

Our customer is an aftermarket automotive parts manufacturer and distributor. They’ve recently been undergoing a major transformation to improve how they fill customer orders.

The transformation comes at a time when they’re experiencing growing demand and a shrinking workforce as many tenured employees retire.

In their distribution facilities, “travel waste,” the time it takes an employee to travel from one picking location to another, was the main inefficiency. One employee picked the entirety of an order. No matter where the product was located in the 750,000 square foot warehouse, employees would walk aisle to aisle to retrieve and add it to the order.

The first decision was to move away from manual order assignment with a single individual picking the entire order.

They adopted a zoned picking process driven by a new WES platform. This enabled them to assign pickers to specific areas in the warehouse, cutting down on travel time and enabling the pickers to become very familiar with their zone.

They installed several Vertical Lift Modules to further consolidate picking and make better use of their space. These fully automated vertical storage systems take up less floorspace and allow them to condense 30% of all picks, 11,000 SKUs, and eliminate 138 feet per pick.

The company also invested in autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). These transport robots independently move products from the picking zones through the warehouse to a centralized packing location, eliminating unproductive travel time.

Introducing such a transformational change in the way the facility operated meant that everyone on the team immediately had a skills gap. 250 employees’ jobs changed entirely. Others needed to be trained to maintain and troubleshoot the AMR fleet. And some needed to be cross trained to operate the VLMs as well. In total, 600 employees had to be re-trained to do parts or all of their job.

“Automation” can be a scary word for many people. So, another concern for management was to help employees feel comfortable and confident with the changes.

Acadia helped them simplify complex procedures, close the skills gaps, and do it in a way that employees didn’t become overwhelmed. 

The Operational Excellence team created comprehensive SOP documents for employees to use for training, and revisit on the job. On average, each employee references these documents four times a day.

With Acadia, they created an AMR manual with acknowledgments, quizzes, and procedures and incorporated it into their leadership training regimen. By using Acadia SOPs to train employees, AMR onboarding and deployment became the most successful project in years.

The operational excellence manager said Acadia has decreased employee apprehension and made automation and new technology more exciting. The changes were adopted with minimal disruption. No orders were delayed and it’s even led to promotions.