How FedEx is now able to complete accurate work sampling studies across 29 of their distribution centers in less than a week.
”What used to take 4 to 8 weeks for a work sampling project now can be completed in less than a week.”
– Kristen McCloskey Dexter, FedEx
Delivering Success
The Hub Operations department at FedEx is using a new approach to test and set their work standards in order to determine where the opportunity for improvement is. UMT Plus technology is allowing them to gather work samples from 29 distribution centers and easily unify the data to create more accurate statistics.
Challenge
“Before using Umt Plus, we were using the stopwatch and pen method which limited our options because of how long the study took to complete,” says Kristen McCloskey Dexter, Hub Operations and Engineering Support. Previously her department would pick one hub in each division and would set standards based on that sample.
“The old method would take 4 to 8 weeks at least and the data was not necessarily representative of all of the hubs.”
Solution
Several colleagues suggested that the team at FedEx would benefit from the UMT Plus software. After doing a trial, the department invested in multiple licenses for their 27 engineers that would be collecting work samples in each of the 29 hubs.
Using their own customized study, the engineers are now able to do process checks of package handlers. The field engineers are able to capture the work that is actually being done to see if standards meet the predetermined time studies in order to validate existing standards or generate new standards.
Results
FedEx is now able to capture more samples across all of the facilities while minimizing the work for the field engineers. “The UMT Plus software enables us to study each of the hubs and have a complete assessment in a week max. Furthermore, the extra amount of data we can get makes our results much more accurate”
Kristen assures that she would recommend the software to other organizations facing similar challenges. “Major benefits of using UMT Plus include; data integrity, improved data quality, the ability to get data from across facilities and then unify the data. Plus, it’s easy to learn how to use, and saves us a lot of time.”
