Active floor supervision allows managers to enhance performance in the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to identify which employees might require more training and which may be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that occurs there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and really vital; lastly, you can deal with issues as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: Start by examining cube utilization in your facility. Inspect if there is much empty space near the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and particular forklifts which operate in those types of environments can greatly increase how you store and move materials. What might not seem like a lot of wasted space could mean thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some 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. Furthermore, if you have many 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? Make the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Approximately 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You could probably have less personnel finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to finish various other jobs instead of having employees doubled up moving items would get more work out of the same amount of employees.
The order filling procedure should be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location. If orders do not need objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big waste of time is having the same SKU located in many places inside the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a particular place for each specific item so that they are just looking in one area and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes can vastly enhance the overall efficiency within your warehouse.