Technology is the greatest change agent around. Consider how integrated your life is with your technology – you can manage bank accounts, interact with friends, plan vacations, research purchases, and pay bills online. But many people still use a whiteboard, clipboard or spreadsheet for critical business processes such as appointment scheduling.

Companies can spend up to 20 minutes scheduling each inbound delivery or outbound pickup appointment. If you’re have multiple doors in your facility, that adds up to a lot of wasted time you could be spending on something much more productive. With so much of yours and your customer’s daily routine online, does it make sense to continue managing your appointments manually?

Using a whiteboard or spreadsheet affords you infinite flexibility but provides you with little validation. Technology allows you to set up buildings, doors, rules, time frames, reservations – anything and everything that defines what and how you build your schedules. You get the flexibility that you need with the framework, auditability, and consistency that drives better results to the bottom line.

HighJump’s resource scheduling solution provides a set of tools to help you cost effectively move from a manual appointment system to an automated one.

1 – Improve efficiency

Save staffing costs by centralizing your scheduling function and making it visible across your extended enterprise. Automating your schedule does more than increase visibility and avoid conflicts: it allows you to put proactive processes in place that are driven by the schedule that you’ve assembled.

Opportunities like optimizing picking processes in the warehouse around inbound freight carrier appointments increase the effectiveness of key processes in your business by leveraging your electronic appointment information.

2 – Improve Throughput

Minimize congestion on the dock by consistently applying scheduling rules.

Companies invest in solutions like demand planning, warehouse management, and transportation management to help them optimize their supply chain, yet very little attention is paid to the pickup and delivery processes. Studies show that carriers spend more time waiting for access to a dock door than actually loading or unloading their trailers.

HighJump’s web-centric design allows you to quickly and easily book an appointment based around customizable business rules for each facility and door. You can even share the schedule with both internal users and external partners and customers.

3 – Increase Asset Utilisation

Undoubtedly your organization has people or things that are in scarce supply. Rather than hoping that you’re getting maximum utilization of those resources, put your system to work at keeping track of them using an “Outlook-like” user experience to book appointments. By utilizing resource scheduling you’ll get the most out your team while providing a quick view for managers to analyse.

Available both as a fully integrated component of the overall HighJump family of supply chain products or as a standalone solution, our resource scheduling solution can allow your users to optimize inbound and outbound traffic for increased speed and efficiency.

4 – Access Historical Data

Analyse historical trends to predict facility and workforce requirements. When you run your business based upon a well-defined schedule, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy the personnel levels necessary. The knowledge that comes with effective resource scheduling allows you to optimize the utilization of your labour force across the processes vying for their time and ensure that you always have adequate resources to complete a job on time without delaying other processes within the business.

5 – Improve Access

Give both internal users, customers and vendors access to your appointment schedule so that they can: (1) have visibility to the availability of resources, (2) coordinate people and resources around upcoming appointments, and (3) recognize underutilized resources and put them to work in other important processes around the business.

HighJump’s User Experience

It’s not enough to have a robust system – it needs to be easy for users to grasp.

HighJump’s innovative user interface is delivered in a browser but acts like a familiar solution that you use every day. From dragging an inbound or outbound order onto the calendar, to progressing the life-cycle of an appointment from the guard shack, the user experience makes it easy to train your team to take advantage of your HighJump resource scheduling solution.

With the HighJump platform, iWMS Australasia can offer your business a tailored, configurable and scalable solution that will meet your exact business needs today and for years to come.

Click here to download the full HighJump WMS Resource Scheduling brochure.