Warehouse workers waste productivity when they lose the wireless connection between their mobile device and the building’s warehouse management system (WMS), a circumstance that occurs at least once per hour for over 30% of workers, according to a report from software firm StayLinked.
In the majority of warehouses, dropped sessions are deemed to be a standard occurrence that workers simply endure, StayLinked said in its report, “Dropped Sessions – The Hidden Productivity Killer.” However, the impact goes further than just productivity, since workers often lose access to the workflow task they were in the process of completing, which can include associated data. And resolving the issue often requires them to login again and repeat the task – or even swap their device for a new one – increasing the risk of missed service level agreements (SLAs) and financial penalties.
But although dropped sessions cost warehouses significant amounts in lost profitability, many warehouse operations managers are not fully aware that the issue can be defined as a single identifiable problem, the report found. “Warehouse managers may have overlooked dropped sessions as being a prolific productivity killer because ‘dropped sessions’ is not a term used by warehouse workers when experiencing connection issues,” Justin Griffith, StayLinked’s chief technology officer, said in a release. “Workers refer to program crash, black screen, system crash, power failure, glitch, mobile device outage, and many other descriptions, which makes it challenging for warehouse managers to identify dropped sessions as being the major cause of workflow disruptions.”
In addition, 47% of survey respondents in the report believe that dropped sessions are caused by the hardware in their mobile devices, while research shows that the cause is often the terminal emulation (TE) software used by over half of warehouses around the world. “The deployment of the right TE software delivers session persistence by enabling the worker’s workflow session to reside on a resident server and not on the worker’s mobile device. This ensures that if connectivity issues arise, connectivity to the WMS and the resulting data is not lost, even in 5G and private-5G network environments,” Griffith said.
