In the distribution center, active floor management could assist the managers to enhance performance in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of issues.
It helps to recognize which employees might 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 everything that happens there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and really essential; lastly, you can address issues as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: Start by examining cube utilization within your facility. Inspect if there is a lot of empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and particular forklifts that operate in those kinds of environments can greatly increase how you store and transport materials. What might 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 example, if a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in more than a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. Moreover, if you have numerous half-full pallets staged or stored 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 could be made to accommodate objects which are moving faster.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. Around 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could probably have less employees completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to complete various other tasks instead of having personnel doubled up transporting objects would get more work out of the same amount of staff.
The order filling process should be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place. If orders do not need items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big time-waster is having the same SKU located in multiple locations inside the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a specific place for each specific thing so that they are simply looking in one place and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one location for the same thing. These small changes could greatly improve the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.