Within the distribution center, active floor management can help the managers to improve performance in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to recognize which employees may need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits can be utilized to see who might be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything which happens there and the workers to be essential to the overall operation and extremely important; lastly, you can address problems as they occur.
Determine the Utilization of Space: Start by examining cube utilization within your facility. Check if there is a lot of empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and specific forklifts which operate in those kinds of settings could greatly increase how you store and move materials. What may not look like a lot of wasted area could mean thousands of square feet and extra dollars with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you notice a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in more than a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. What's more, if you have lots of half-full pallets that are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, a lot of room can be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
How is the Flow of Product? Check to see if the flow of products is both sequential and logical, by taking the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility on a regular basis. About 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You could probably have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to finish various other jobs instead of having employees doubled up transporting things will get more work out of the same amount of employees.
The order filling procedure should be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location. If orders do not need items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another huge time-waster is having the same SKU located in many locations within the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a specific location for each particular thing so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes could vastly improve the overall efficiency in your warehouse.