In the distribution center, active floor management could help the managers to improve performance in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of issues.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to recognize which employees may require more training and which may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything which occurs there and the workers to be essential to the overall operation and very important; lastly, you could deal with problems as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: To begin with, you must determine the cube utilization in you workplace, making sure to examine how much empty space is situated near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and particular forklifts which work in those types of environments could greatly increase how you transport and store materials. What may not seem like a lot of wasted area could translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: 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. As well, if you have many half-full pallets which are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing valuable 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 Product Flow? Check to see if the flow of products is both sequential and logical, by taking the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Approximately 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can potentially have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to complete different other jobs instead of having workers doubled up moving objects will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
Review how the order filling procedure is happening. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location and orders do not require items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big time-waster is having the same SKU situated in many places in the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a specific place for each particular item so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes could greatly enhance the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.