Within the distribution center, active floor management can assist the managers to enhance performance in 3 main ways. Be sure to frequently walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to identify 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 all goings on there and the employees to be vital to the overall operation and extremely essential; lastly, you can deal with issues as they happen.
Determine the Use of Space: Begin by examining cube utilization within your facility. Check if there is much empty space near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts which operate in those kinds of settings can really increase how you store and move supplies. What might not seem like a lot of wasted area could translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. Moreover, if you have many half-full pallets which are staged or stored 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 space can be made to accommodate items that are moving faster.
How is the Product Flow? Take the time to trace how exactly product flows through your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. About 60% of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can probably have less employees completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to complete various other tasks rather than having workers doubled up moving things will get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
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 waste of time is having the same SKU situated in multiple locations within the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a particular place for every specific item so that they are simply 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.