Within the distribution center, active floor supervision could help the supervisors to enhance performance in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to identify which employees might need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These regular visits could be used to see who might be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that occurs there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and very vital; lastly, you can address problems as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: Start 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 particular forklifts which operate in those kinds of settings could greatly increase how you transport and store materials. What might not look like a lot of wasted space can mean thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: For example, if a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. Moreover, if you have many half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using valuable 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 that are moving faster.
How is the Product Flow? Take the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. About 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can potentially have less personnel completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to finish various other tasks instead of having employees doubled up transporting items would get more work out of the same amount of staff.
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. One more huge time-waster is having the same SKU situated in multiple places within the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a specific location for each and every particular thing so that they are just looking in one area and not traveling through the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes could greatly improve the overall effectiveness within your warehouse.