BUSI 443 Week 2 Case Study 1 Example

Planning the Workforce for a New Fulfillment Center: Forecasts, Gaps, Action Plans and Job Analysis

Question 1: Forecasting Requirements and Availability

Riverside Distribution, a regional third-party logistics company, will open a 400,000-square-foot fulfillment center in eight months to serve a new online retail client. The client expects to ship about 18,000 orders a day in normal periods and up to 45,000 a day from mid-November through December. Heneman et al. (2015) describe staffing planning as forecasting labor requirements, forecasting labor availability, reconciling the two to find gaps and then developing action plans.

Requirements were estimated from the productivity standards in the case: a picker handles about 110 orders per shift, a packer about 140, and each shift needs one lead for every 15 associates and one supervisor for every 60. Availability comes from Riverside's two nearby centers, which can transfer about 12 percent of their associates and several supervisors without harming their own operations.

The center therefore needs to recruit roughly 300 people for normal operations, and up to about 500 more for the peak.

Question 2: Action Plans for Each Gap

The gaps differ in size, timing and difficulty, so the plans should differ as well. Heneman et al. (2015) distinguish core workforce staffing, which builds a permanent workforce, from flexible workforce staffing, which uses temporary and other arrangements to meet fluctuating demand.

For pickers, packers and receiving associates, the center should hire about 85 percent of the normal requirement as core employees and fill the rest through a staffing agency, which allows adjustments if volumes differ from forecasts. For the peak, it should rely on seasonal hiring through the agency and a direct seasonal program that invites strong seasonal workers back each year. Leads should come mainly from promoting high-performing associates during the first months, supplemented by transfers. Supervisors should be filled internally where possible, since internal candidates know Riverside's systems, with the remainder hired externally. Maintenance technicians are the hardest to find in the local market and should be recruited first, at a competitive wage, with a referral bonus for current technicians. If local recruiting falls short, Riverside can partner with a nearby technical college to train entry-level technicians, an investment that pays off over several years.

Timeline for the Action Plans

Timing matters as much as numbers. Working backward from the opening date, the plan should recruit maintenance technicians and external supervisors in months one and two, since they must help install and test equipment. Leads and the first transfers should be in place by month four to learn the new systems. Core associates should be hired in two waves in months six and seven, so that training can be completed in small groups before the client's first shipments. The staffing agency contract should be signed by month five, with seasonal recruiting starting in September for the November peak. Nkomo et al. (2011) present skill-building exercises in which students lay out staffing activities against a calendar, and the same discipline here prevents the common mistake of recruiting everyone at once and training no one well.

Question 3: Job Analysis and Rewards for the New Jobs

The new center will use automated sortation equipment that Riverside's existing sites lack, so the jobs cannot simply be copied from current descriptions. A job analysis should pin down what each job involves and the capabilities it demands, using observation at a client site with similar equipment, interviews with the equipment vendor's trainers and questionnaires completed by experienced leads.

The process must guard against inaccuracy. Morgeson and Campion (1997) cataloged the ways job analysis can go wrong, from social pressures such as group conformity and the wish to look good, to cognitive limits such as incomplete information, careless responding and biased processing of what respondents know. In this case, leads describing a job they hope to supervise may overstate its complexity, and vendor trainers may describe ideal rather than actual work. Using several sources, checking responses against observation and reviewing the results with supervisors at the existing sites will reduce these errors.

Rewards matter because the center competes with other warehouses for associates. Heneman et al. (2015) describe the employee value proposition as the overall package of rewards a job offers. Riverside's should include starting pay at or slightly above the local warehouse median, predictable schedules posted two weeks ahead, a shift differential for nights, tuition support and a visible path from associate to lead within a year. These rewards should be identified during job analysis, since what applicants value shapes how the jobs are advertised.

Question 4: Building Turnover Into the Plan

Warehouse jobs have high turnover, and a plan that ignores it will fall short within months. Pooling many studies, Hancock et al. (2013) showed that organizations with more employee turnover tended to perform worse, though the strength of that link differed from one setting to another. For Riverside, turnover means not only replacement costs but also lost productivity while new associates learn the work.

The plan should therefore assume that about 40 percent of associates will leave in the first year, based on Riverside's experience at its other centers, and recruit continuously rather than in a single wave. It should also act to reduce turnover: realistic previews of the work during hiring, structured onboarding during the first month, and attention to schedule stability, which exit interviews at the other centers cite as the leading reason for leaving.

Question 5: Diversity and Legal Considerations

The plan must also comply with equal employment opportunity requirements and reflect the community the center will serve. Heneman et al. (2015) describe diversity and affirmative action planning as part of staffing planning, comparing the workforce's composition with the availability of qualified people in the relevant labor market. As a federal contractor through one of its clients, Riverside maintains an affirmative action plan, so the new center's hiring goals should be set from local labor market data on women and minority workers in warehouse occupations. Practical steps include advertising openings through community organizations and workforce development agencies, holding hiring events in neighborhoods with good transit access to the site, using consistent screening criteria drawn from the job analysis, and tracking applicant flow by stage to detect any step at which particular groups drop out. These steps widen the applicant pool, which the center needs given the size of its gaps, and they protect the company legally.

Conclusion

Riverside should begin by recruiting maintenance technicians and supervisors, the longest lead-time roles, and by contracting with a staffing agency for flexible workers. It should complete job analysis for the automated roles within the first two months so that recruiting materials and training can be built from accurate job information. Finally, it should plan for continuous hiring and invest in retention from the start, since the center's performance will depend on keeping the people it hires. A monthly review comparing actual headcount, turnover and productivity with the forecasts will let managers adjust the plan quickly, for example by converting reliable agency workers to core employees or by adding a weekend shift if volumes run ahead of the client's estimates.

References

Hancock, J. I., Allen, D. G., Bosco, F. A., McDaniel, K. R., & Pierce, C. A. (2013). Meta-analytic review of employee turnover as a predictor of firm performance. Journal of Management, 39(3), 573-603. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311424943

Heneman, H. G., III, Judge, T. A., & Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. (2015). Staffing organizations (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Morgeson, F. P., & Campion, M. A. (1997). Social and cognitive sources of potential inaccuracy in job analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(5), 627-655. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.82.5.627

Nkomo, S. M., Fottler, M. D., & McAfee, R. B. (2011). Human resource management applications: Cases, exercises, incidents, and skill builders (7th ed.). South-Western Cengage Learning.