Mike Dedunovich expresses his opinion on this matter. “You are more likely to lose an intelligent logistician not from the introduction of automation, but from the fact that you did not appreciate his effective work in time today.
If a person’s work is not transparent to you, if you do not see how beneficial he is for your company, you will not particularly value him. And with any staff reduction, you may accidentally fire someone who actually brings you a lot of money. As philosophers say, “you can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater”.
What’s the recipe here? You should see the real effectiveness of this logistician every day. For example, in our delivery optimization system LOGIMUS, your logistician begins to play with parameters after forming a standard robot solution. And his actions further reduced shipping costs. The mileage and number of cars have been reduced. To do this, the logistician, under his own responsibility, expanded the scope of what was permitted: in some places he allowed drivers to be a little late, and he allowed some drivers who agreed to overtime to extend their shifts. If there are no complaints, it means that these decisions were absolutely competent. It is the flexibility of the human mind that has provided you with significant cost savings. You see this, and you can reward the logistician for effective initiatives.
How can you see this? We can log every optimization request. Compare: what the robot calculated according to the strict conditions of your EPPI, and what the robot calculated with the adjustments of your logistician. If, let’s say, you needed 80 delivery vehicles according to the robot’s decision, and then, taking into account the less stringent requirements of the logistician, 75 turned out to be enough, which means that 5 delivery vehicles are savings due to the logistician’s competence. This is your money taken out of nowhere. If you share at least 1/20 of this additional income with your logistician, and from, say, 20,000 dollars saved per month, pay him a 1000 thousand dollar bonus, he will be satisfied with your work, you will not lose him. And vice versa, if during the audit process it turns out that your logistician is incompetent, he is not competitive. Because of this, you systematically spend significantly more on your delivery than your competitors, and he doesn’t want to change, doesn’t want to learn new technology, which means it makes sense for him to find a replacement.@