In the distribution center, active floor supervision can help the supervisors to enhance 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 regular visits could be used to see who may be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that happens there and the workers to be essential to the overall operation and extremely vital; finally, you could deal with issues as they happen.
Determine the Use of Space: Start by checking cube utilization within your facility. Check if there is a lot of empty space near the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and specific forklifts which work in those types of settings could really increase how you store and move materials. What may not seem like a lot of wasted area can translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you notice a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in over a year, it is definitely consuming valuable space. Moreover, if you have lots of half-full pallets that 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, a lot of room could be made to accommodate faster moving items.
How is the Flow of Product? Check to see if the product flow is both sequential and logical, by making the time to trace how exactly product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Around 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can probably have less personnel finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to complete other tasks rather than having employees doubled up moving things will get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
The order filling procedure must be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place. If orders do not require items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big time-waster is having the same SKU located in many places 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 area and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes could greatly enhance the overall effectiveness inside your warehouse.