Founded in Germany, EPG boasts nearly 35 years of deep experience in warehouse management, and ever-growing successes in highly complex and automated environments. Competitive pricing and TCO play an important role in its offering to customers, while it has also built a strong reputation as an innovator in technologies that support warehouse management excellence, such as its LYDIA Voice picking solution.
EPG leaders expressed their delight that the company’s all-round expertise in WMS and Supply Chain is finding new ways to help customers meet their warehouse management challenges.
“Our WMS is at the core of our EPG ONE vision, which is to optimize our customers’ businesses both in their warehouse environments and across their entire supply chain journey,” said Marco Ehrhardt, President of EPG. “We are therefore honored and delighted that Gartner has recognized us as a Challenger for the third time. We believe that EPG customers can take confidence from Gartner’s recognition of our successes in complex, automated settings. Automation is at the heart of warehouse competitiveness in a fast-changing world, and we intend to keep innovating to meet our customers’ needs.”
EPG’s world-leading supply chain technologies
LFS is the WMS at the heart of EPG’s suite of automated supply chain solutions. Tailored to an organization’s specific requirements, it monitors and controls all warehouse processes to facilitate speed, efficiency and transparency. As well as hands-free, eyes-free LYDIA Voice picking, packages are also available to streamline workforce management and contract and billing systems. Outside the warehouse, its popular transport management systems [TMS] now include Greenplan, an envelope-pushing vehicle routing and scheduling [VRS] application.
A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant helps you quickly ascertain how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view.
Key Issues Facing HR Leaders to be Discussed at Gartner ReimagineHR Conference, October 24-26, in Orlando
Leader and manager effectiveness is the most frequent top priority [60% of respondents] among HR leaders for 2023, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc.
The survey of 860 HR leaders in July 2022 found the other top organizational priorities for HR leaders next year are: organizational and change management [53%], employee experience [47%], recruiting [46%] and the future of work [42%].
“Rising inflation, scarce expensive talent, and global supply constraints represent a new combination of variables for HR leaders to understand as they consider their 2023 strategies,” said Mark Whittle, vice president of advisory in the Gartner HR practice.
HR leaders can drive their organization forward and gain competitive advantage by actioning on the below new imperatives:
A New Approach to Leadership Social and political turbulence, work-life fusion, and flexible work arrangements are redefining the leader-employee dynamic, yet 24% of HR leaders say their leadership development approach does not prepare leaders for the future of work. As today’s work environment changes, leaders must embrace human-centric leadership, defined by three traits:
· Authenticity: Enable true self-expression for themselves and their teams
· Empathy: Show genuine care, respect, and concern for employee well-being
· Adaptivity: Enable flexibility and support that fits the unique needs of team members
“These shifts are not creating entirely new responsibilities, but they require leaders to achieve their core responsibilities in different ways,” said Whittle. “The new dynamic is not simply a leader-to-employee relationship, but a human-to-human one.”
Adopt an Open-Source Change Strategy Forty-five percent of HR leaders say their employees are fatigued from the continuous disruption of the last several years. High employee change fatigue and increased work friction are correlated with a lower intent to stay with the organization. Gartner research shows only 43% of employees who experience above-average change fatigue intend to stay with their organization, compared with 74% of employees with low levels of fatigue.
HR leaders can decrease change fatigue and support employees through periods of uncertainty with an open-source change strategy that is less prescriptive than top-down approaches and more collaborative. Organizations that utilize open-source change strategies – involving employees throughout the process – can decrease the risk of change fatigue in their employees by 29 percentage points and increase employee intent to stay by as much as 19 percentage points.
Compelling Careers Are Critical for Retention A Gartner survey of more than 3,300 employees conducted in March 2022 found that just one in four employees is confident about their career at their organization. The survey also revealed that three in four employees looking for a new role are looking externally first, not internally.
Progressive HR functions are changing how they approach career growth. Creating career paths in today’s environment includes providing employees with the ability to experience other career options, sharing diverse colleague examples to show many routes to career progression and offering channels for employees to create best-fit careers.
“HR leaders must design careers and mobility more like navigation systems, which dynamically inform drivers of new preferred routes, obstacles to avoid, and choices between fastest- and most fuel-efficient routes,” added Whittle.
Recruiting in a Volatile Labor Market Even with the current slowdown in many companies hiring, sourcing for critical, scarce talent remains a must-have priority. Thirty-six percent of HR leaders report that their sourcing strategies are insufficient for finding the skills they need.
To recruit in today’s labor market more effectively, organizations should pursue three strategies:
· Leverage hiring managers earlier in the process as they are the most trusted source by candidates
· Build an equitable internal labor market
· Develop onboarding programs that promote new hire engagement in today’s hybrid environment
Workforce Planning Doesn’t Match Today’s Reality Fifty-one percent of HR leaders reported that their workforce planning is limited to headcount alone. Employers are also confronting the reality that their workforce planning assumptions no longer hold in today’s environment. For instance, employers are finding it increasingly difficult to predict future skills or to fill future talent gaps primarily through buying and building talent.
HR needs a new approach to solve for today’s evolving workplace. To address shifting skills needs, HR should lead their organization to anticipate near-term shifts in critical work by evaluating tasks and workflows. When met with talent scarcity, HR should collaborate with leaders to redeploy tasks flexibly across the organization to increase resilience.