The people who study warehouse effectiveness have found that roughly 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in the majority of material handling facilities. The goal is to be able to minimize forklift time and travel distance in specific ways that really help prevent equipment abuse and product damage. Several of the most common efficiency barriers to numerous warehouses are discussed below.
New product lines are stored wherever there is extra room, not necessarily where it makes the most sense. Frequently handled things are separated due to storage handling requirements or to size. Because of increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or SKUs have proliferated. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are reduced because of bad lighting. The lift truck fleet is too small and more round trips are needed utilizing the same machinery. Forklifts experience slowdowns and detours due to poor equipment maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse design usually causes dead-end aisles and unproductive workflows.
There are 3 main areas to focus on if any of the above concerns seem familiar at your place of work, or if you know ways to be more effective overall:
Shipping, Receiving and Storage Layout: Utilize a facility layout and draw a series of arrows that reflect the way your product flows. The best facilities provide a single direction, well-organized flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows go in the opposite to the desired direction or double backwards in any spots or go in numerous different directions, then you have determined your inefficient spots.
Work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between destination and source, decrease bottleneck areas when you have identified your trouble spots. This could be done by re-vamping any forklift and high-travel congestion areas.
Cross-Docking? For objects which rapidly move throughout your facility, consider cross-docking options. The cross-docked inventory is not stored in the warehouse. It is moved from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the consolidation and sorting is often done within the shipping areas. The simplest things to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying expenses.
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