Within the distribution center, active floor supervision could assist the supervisors to improve performance in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of issues.
By having management show presence on the floor on a regular basis, it helps to identify which workers might need more training and which may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the employees to be vital to the overall operation and really important; finally, you can deal with problems as they happen.
Determine the Utilization of Space: To start with, you should determine the cube utilization in you workplace, making sure to examine how much empty space is situated close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and particular forklifts which work in those kinds of environments can greatly increase how you store and transport supplies. What may not look like a lot of wasted area could translate into 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 more than a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. Furthermore, 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 doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, a lot of space can be made to accommodate items which are moving faster.
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 precisely product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Approximately 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can probably have less personnel completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to finish other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving items will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
The order filling method should be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location. If orders do not need things of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more huge time-waster is having the same SKU located in multiple locations in the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific location for each and every particular thing so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one location for the same thing. These small changes can vastly enhance the overall effectiveness within your warehouse.