Within the distribution center, active floor supervision can help the managers to improve performance in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of issues.
It helps to recognize which employees may require more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits can be utilized to see who may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the workers to be vital to the overall operation and really important; finally, you could address issues as they arise.
Determine the Use of Space: To start with, you must determine the cube utilization in you workspace, making sure to examine how much empty space is situated close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts which operate in those kinds of settings could greatly increase how you store and move supplies. What may not seem 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 stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. Also, if you have many half-full pallets which are staged or stored in aisles, you are also not using valuable space to its full potential. By re-organizing existing stock and doing an inventory overhaul, much room could be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
How is the Product Flow? Check to see if the product flow is both logical and sequential, by taking the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility on a regular basis. About 60% of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can probably have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to complete other jobs instead of having personnel doubled up transporting things will get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
The order filling procedure should 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 situated in many places within the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a particular location for every specific item so that they are just looking in one area and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes can greatly improve the overall efficiency in your warehouse.