Within the distribution center, active floor management could assist the supervisors to enhance performance in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to recognize which employees might require more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These regular visits could be utilized to see who might be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the workers to be essential to the overall operation and really essential; lastly, you can address problems as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: Begin by examining cube utilization in your facility. Check if there is much empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and particular forklifts that work in those types of environments can greatly increase how you store and transport supplies. What might not look like a lot of wasted space could translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: Like for instance, if a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. As well, if you have many half-full pallets that are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, a lot of room could be made to accommodate objects which are moving faster.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Approximately 60 percent of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can probably have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to finish various other jobs instead of having workers doubled up transporting items would get more work out of the same amount of staff.
The order filling method must be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place. If orders do not need things of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big time-waster is having the same SKU located in multiple places within the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a specific place for every specific thing so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes can greatly enhance the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.