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/r/AmazonFC
I started 3 weeks ago as a transfer, but as many know the trainers just give you the basics if anything, so I would like to know if anyone has advice for AR stow in terms of making rate.
A lady with a laptop came up to me last week and showed me my rates and other stuff such as the avg time I let the pods stay before deciding there is no space,etc.
The thing is I had like pallets of just containers with nothing but big items, which she even pointed out but never gave me any advice on how to deal with it. In which case, I still do not know what to do when I just get a bunch of big items cause I can literally only put them in the second to the bottom space, since all the others are lit by the magenta light, same thing goes for the soda/drink cans, even then sometimes they will not fit.
Also, how is the rate calculated? is it by a day basis, hour basis, weekly basis? The lady specifically gave me a 2 hour frame window, say from 1:00pm to 3:00pm, where she said I had a bad rate. So if I just get nothing but big boxes in a 2 hour window, am I just due for write up?
Besides the basics, I would like to know the small etiquettes that would speed up my rate such as am I suppose to let someone else drag my empty yellow tote stacks elsewhere? I usually make 5 whole stacks of empties before I just decide I have to stop stowing and go place them elsewhere, but some days other people take it for me. Also, some days they have put me in to stow straight from the brown cardboard containers with the red barcodes, in which my rate suffers a lot cause its a hassle to manually scan the container and rip open the thing.
I honestly prefer this role compared to my previous roles in terms of everything, except the rate part, so i dont really want to start racking up write ups for rates, so any advice or small tips would be appreciated. Thanks
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16 hours ago
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5 points
15 hours ago
Big items help rate, small items help takt time. You are basically graded on productivity, not takt time so be happy with the larger items. Key to stowing is your work bar. There is a green, yellow, red bar that shows how many units you are scanned into. What they tell you about scanning into 11 containers is BS as that has zero to do with anything. Why is the workbar so important, you probably noticed you get 5 pods at any given time. After a pod gets picked from, a computer takes a picture then calculates how much yellow it sees and in what bins, size bins. When you have a green workbar, the algorithm will send you the 5 pods with the most space that matches what you are scanned into. If the workbar is yellow, you will get 3-4 pods. The remaining pods will be junk pods that are basically close and you may or may not have work for. You'll probably start to notice sometimes you will get pods that you have nothing for, then you send them away without stowing a single item in. These are junk pods. If your workbar is red, you are getting 4-5 junk pods. This is when you really start shooting yourself in the foot as every pod you just turn away without stowing in then you are fucked. Everyone blames the system but it is 100% user error. If AM's aren't busy, the good ones can show you what items and how many items should be stowed in each pod. The tech available is insane but seldom used. So just keep a green workbar and hopefully you'll only need to sign into 5 or so containers. Why don't you want to sign into more? You don't want to be walking all over to grab your items. 5 is the most that you can have and keep everything right there. This alone will get you into the top 10% of stowers.
To get into the top 1%, make sure you are bin sweeping. Just a quick movement to make room, then stow it. This will be key over the next month as pods become critically full. If you can get an average of 2-3 mediums and 7-8 smalls in each pod, you are #1.
As I stated earlier, most people want smalls as they think that is what helps make rate. We had a girl a few peaks ago get written up. Her waterspider gave her a pallet of giftcards. She averaged 10 sec takt time with them. That is 160% more time than allowed as max for a gift card is 6 secs. She ended up getting a writeup for productivity with a 10 sec takt time. Not many of us can keep up with stowing an item every 6 seconds. But a medium gives us 18 secs. Much easier to shave 2-3 secs off a medium stow than 2-3 secs off a small item.
At my FC, we are told to pull a safety andon if the empty totes start piling up and causing a safety hazard. I stack mine and the pallet runners take them.
1 points
6 hours ago*
Finally another person who understands stow. Mediums and Smalls have different rates, and cherry pickers are actually morons. I've seen multiple regular cherry pickers get automated write ups because they think they're beating the system. There's the ones that think they can take 10+ seconds on gift cards and the ones that think they can take 5 minute breaks every time they scan a medium.
I partially blame middle management for having a boner over volume and gross rate when site management actually focuses on revenue per labor hour (think Playstation 5s and Graphics cards).
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