PLANCISE is redefining workforce management
(Marchtrenk, 28 February 2023) PLANCISE, founded by TGW Logistics Group, is a start-up that is developing an innovative software for staff and shift planning in distribution centers. The versatile and high-performance tool presents an answer to the challenges that many companies are currently facing.
A central element in TGW's range of products and services is a comprehensive software portfolio: TGW Warehouse Software (which plans, controls, monitors, and optimizes all processes in a fulfillment center), the implementation of SAP EWM®, and a variety of other digital products and services. PLANCISE is the latest innovation.
Material flow is well-planned and well-structured in modern distribution centers. Yet the same is not always true of workforce management. Despite the fact that staff and shift planning is key for efficient operation, many companies still rely on Excel spreadsheets for this purpose. This prevents flexible planning, performance or productivity analyses, and the ability to maintain a reliable view of the workforce as a whole; instead, the work is time-consuming and susceptible to errors.
Even software solutions used for payroll, are not necessarily suited to handling workforce management. Their main issue is not enough flexibility to adapt to changing conditions in a fulfillment center. For example, operational delays in one area can lead to delivery backlogs and imbalances in staffing that are hard to overcome. Increasingly unpredictable ordering behavior and volatile supply chains also complicate things immensely as distribution center managers decide how to allocate their workforce.
"No matter whether they run medium-sized or global businesses, many logistics managers carry out short- and medium-term staff and shift planning using systems that were not meant for that purpose," explains PLANCISE founder Thomas Mahringer.
"If a supplier is late, a technical error occurs, or too many orders unexpectedly come in at the same time, you quickly reach your limit. And this is an industry characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. That is why a lot of managers are searching so desperately for a solution tailored to the warehouse automation industry and thus to their particular needs."
With these challenges in mind, PLANCISE has developed an intelligent software that boasts great performance, flexibility, and user friendliness. It can produce analyses at the push of a button, make recommendations, and visualize data on one dashboard. Several TGW customers are already employing the workforce management tool as part of a pilot program.
"We used a cloud-native development approach and made PLANCISE available to our customers with just a few clicks," emphasizes Thomas Mahringer. "Both the application lifecycle, which includes 400 automated regression tests, and the application and usage monitoring are automated."
