Warehouse Operations
The economic times has impacted on every aspect of business, including warehousing and distribution. Warehouses are looking to reduce operating expenses but still need to maximize the resources. Other warehouse management challenges which affect the operation will include:
- Maintaining vendor relationships
- Improving inventory controls
- Controlling operational costs
- Satisfying increasingly demanding customers
When looking to optimize your warehousing and distribution operations, you want proven solutions that are aimed to eliminate non-value added processes. Determine what your focus is, distribution to gain visibility, inventory levels, your ability to meet customer demands and shipment schedules. Optimization can reduce operational costs, provide world class compliance for customers and vendors, and leverage real-time information to manage your warehouse operations. Applied smartly, they can bring your organization’s logistics strategy will help provide a competitive edge.
Some high performance strategies adaption in different levels of operation in warehousing and distribution can help these management challenges:
Labor Management
- Tracking real-time activity of warehouse workers and comparing them against labor standards and applying a tool to improve worker productivity.
- Reduce time wasted by deploying methods that reduce travel time, condense the pick face thus allowing your staff to work smarter, not harder.
- Go real time and get rid of paper. You can gain visibility with a warehousing and distribution control system with dashboards, voice-and light directed activities.
Load Building/Cubing
- Can determine the ideal pallet level and placement to determine for each item and enable the warehouse to reduce spacing requirements.
- Consider methods that manage the flow faster and more efficient.
Task Management
- Coordination of the day-to-day work in the warehousing and distribution and create a combination of cycles such as when a worker puts a pallet away, and retrieves the next pallet on the way to the dock area.
- Group orders and concurrently picking SKUs for multiple orders, this will allow the warehouse worker to be more productive.
- Eliminate travel arrange warehouse workers where one remains in a location and retrieves the item to a central location.
Slotting
- Determine the optimal mix of storage mediums and the ideal location based upon projected family groupings, replenishment and cubic velocity.
Use a mixed-case palletizing system to determine if the assembly process will be more efficient. This can be done by streamlining with semi-automated or automated systems; for more efficiency.
- Most importantly, reducing time wasted and faster turn-around times will reduce logistics costs and reduce the stress on warehousing employees and driving towards operational improvements. It is critical to your warehousing staff ability to fill orders quickly, accurately and safely.
Source: Industrial Services
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