Investing in technology to boost staff productivity and support retention helps mitigate the impact of labour shortages

Wincanton is a leading supply chain partner for UK business with supply chain solutions up and down the country, with 20,000 colleagues working at more than 160 sites. Wincanton provides business critical services including storage, handling and distribution and high volume eFulfilment for many of the UK's best-known companies.

As well as recruiting new talent, firms can secure operational efficiencies by deploying robotics in partnership with the existing workforce.

Responding to the challenges of recruiting order fulfilment staff in their warehouses, due in part to recruitment difficulties caused by changes to EU work visas, Wincanton recognised the need to deploy existing staff more effectively.

To do so by increasing productivity, Wincanton adopted collaborative autonomous mobile robot solutions that work seamlessly with employees utilising the latest wearable technology. Each robot can carry a load weight of up to 100kg, operating uninterrupted for 10 hours on a charging time of two hours. Investing in this technology has ensured speed, accuracy and safety in fulfilling customer orders. The autonomous mobile robots allow Wincanton to redeploy colleagues to other tasks across the operation facility, reduces the risk of reliance on short-term seasonal labour to fulfil peak order periods, and has also delivered efficiency in the onboarding process.

Following a managed training programme, new starters can take up the order picking process comfortably and quickly, using the wearable technology and robot to guide an accurate order completion journey safely around the warehouse. Early trials have shown that implementing a digitalised and automated order picking process has reduced the induction time for new starters from 24 to 3 hours, increasing productivity as new employees are able to be embedded in their roles and execute responsibilities more quickly.

When the right talent is hard to find, technology adoption can help firms bolster their retention and recruitment strategies

The CBI report ‘Great Job’ found that the average cost of replacing an employee is between 10%-30% of their salary.  Get it right, however, and high performers have been found to generate 40% higher productivity in operational roles. At a time when gaps in the labour market have made identifying and retaining the right talent difficult, Wincanton looked to invest in a technology that would provide long term savings by limiting turnover and ensure their recruitment process selected suitable candidates.

With this, Wincanton established a new technology partnership with ThriveMap. This technology allows potential employees to experience the roles they are applying for virtually and undertake a customised realistic job assessment. This tool helps to align candidates’ expectations if they have no experience in that type of role, allows Wincanton to fairly screen, score and rank applicants, to better identify likely high performers, and speed up the recruitment process. This ultimately helps to mitigate against high turnover and save cost.

Paul Durkin, Chief Customer and Innovation Officer:

“The supply chains of the future require new people skills to complement today. Engineering, data science and software development are increasingly key to design, build and run tomorrows supply chains. Likewise, collaboration is increasingly a focus to connect with emerging and innovative solutions, our W² Labs programme harnesses this technological talent which is great for our people, customers and stakeholders”