Active floor management enables supervisors to improve performance within the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to frequently walk the floor to stay abreast of issues.
It helps to identify which workers might 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 managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and everything which happens there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and really important; lastly, you can deal with problems as they happen.
Determine the Utilization of Space: Begin by examining cube utilization in your facility. Inspect if there is a lot of empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts that operate in those types of environments could really increase how you store and transport materials. What may not look like much wasted area can translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: Like for example, if a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. What's more, if you have many half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing 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 faster moving objects.
How is the Product Flow? Check to see if the product flow is both sequential and logical, by making the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility regularly. Roughly 60 percent of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You could probably have less personnel completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to finish different other jobs instead of having employees doubled up transporting things would 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 need objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another huge time-waster is having the same SKU situated in many locations inside the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific place for each and every particular thing 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 improve the overall effectiveness in your warehouse.