First time right

How first time right is worked out

The sum is the number of orders completed with no rework, divided by the total number of orders, multiplied by one hundred. You can run the same sum on lines, on inbound receipts or on put-away tasks, and each one answers a different question.

The difficulty is not the arithmetic. It is that rework is usually invisible. A packer who notices a wrong item, walks back to the aisle, swaps it and says nothing has just done rework that no system recorded. Until the second attempt is logged, this figure measures how well you record rework rather than how often it happens, and a suspiciously high number is the normal first result.

So the honest sequence is: give people a one-tap way to log a correction, expect the figure to collapse for a month, and treat that collapse as the measurement finally working.

There is no good number

A warehouse shipping one product in one box size has very little that can need a second attempt. A warehouse where every retail customer wants its own labels, its own paperwork and its own pallet build has a great deal. The two figures are not comparable and neither one says who is better run.

What the figure is for is the trend, and above all the mix underneath it. Sixty reworked orders made up of fifty wrong picks is a pick-face problem. Sixty made up of fifty reprinted labels is a printer problem, and no amount of picker training will touch it.

In practice

Of the 60 reworked orders in that day: 34 were a wrong or short pick caught at the packing bench, 14 were a label or a document reprinted, 9 were repacked into a different box, and 3 waited while a customer-specific form was found. 940 divided by 1,000 is 0.94, so first time right was 94 per cent.

Those 60 orders cost roughly twice the handling of a clean one. At 94 per cent, six per cent of the day's orders are being paid for one and a half times, which is where this figure meets cost per order line. The numbers here are an illustration.

What moves the figure

• Scanning at the point of work. Confirming against a barcode at the pick face and again at the bench stops the largest single category before it becomes rework.
• Printers and labels. Unglamorous and consistently near the top of the list. A label that smudges, a printer that jams at volume, or stock loaded in the wrong tray generates rework all day.
• Packaging rules. If the packer chooses the box, some of them will be wrong. If the system chooses and the carton file is out of date, all of them will be.
• Customer-specific paperwork. Every exception a sales team agrees to is a chance for a second attempt. The exceptions are worth having; they are not worth leaving undocumented.
• How rework is recorded. Counter-intuitively, improving the recording makes the figure worse and the warehouse better. Say so before the first report lands.
• New and temporary staff. The same pattern as picking accuracy: rework clusters around people who do not yet know the building.