Odyssey Talent Management impacts positively on productivity, efficiency and training time

Odyssey Talent Management recently undertook a study on a sample of pickers at a major national supermarket chain. The sample was divided into a group of pickers who had undergone the Odyssey Talent Management process and a group who hadn’t.

In this study, the performance of a sample of 54 pickers was tracked over a three-month period. Of these 54 pickers, 35 had been selected through the candidate performance on Odyssey, and 19 had been recruited at random.

The two groups were measured on their overall productivity on the job (measured in cases per hour) as well as on their overall efficiency. For this study, efficiency was defined as a combination a number of factors, including:

  • Travel distance – the distance to execute a full task, i.e. total kilometres between aisles to pick all stock within one task
  • Store order complexity
  • Exceptions – when a picker arrives at a bin and the bin is empty
  • Master data – information around product size, weight, etc.
  • Productivity – number of cases picked per hour

When analysing the results, it is important to realise that the measure of productivity can be considered a one-dimensional measure, because it does not take all the other key variables included in “efficiency” into account.

The results were as follows:

Thus, the sample of candidates who had completed the Odyssey battery outperformed the sample of candidates who did not complete the Odyssey battery on both measures. The group was 12% more productive and 34% more efficient.

Further, when one considers how long it took for the two groups to complete their training adequately, the Odyssey pickers completed their training in an average of 5.24 weeks, while the non-Odyssey candidates completed their training in 5.10 weeks.

However, most of the Odyssey candidates had no work experience, while the candidates who were not selected through Odyssey had an average of 11 months’ work experience. Thus, considering the advantage of experience, the Odyssey sample of candidates could be considered superior to the non-Odyssey sample.

“Odyssey uses an online gamified application to assess talent at lower levels of work,” explains Odyssey Talent Management MD, Kevin Distiller. “Odyssey is founded on solid psychological assessment principles, and provides a single, end-to-end solution that ticks all the boxes. In addition, because it is easy and fun to use, it draws higher levels of engagement among candidates, producing solid results and recruitment/promotion recommendations.”

For more information on the research and the Odyssey Talent Management system, request a demo or call Kevin on +27 11 803 8703 or +27 82 468 7270.

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