Those who have studied effectiveness in the warehouse has found that 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in material handling facilities. The goal is to reduce forklift time and travel distance in certain ways which truly help avoid machine abuse and product damage. Several of the most common efficiency barriers to a lot of warehouses are discussed below.
New product lines are stored where there is extra room, not necessarily where it makes the most sense. Frequently handled things are separated due to size or to storage handling requirements. Due to increased business, SKUs or also called Stock-Keeping Units have proliferated. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are lessened because of bad lighting. The forklift fleet is very small and a lot more round trips are needed using the same machine. Lift trucks experience slowdowns and detours because of uneven floor surfaces and poor machine maintenance. Inefficient warehouse layout often leads to inefficient workflows and dead-end aisles.
If any of the above issues seem familiar at your place of work, or if you are aware of ways to be more effective overall, there are 3 main areas to focus on:
Shipping, Receiving and Storage Layout: Use a facility layout and draw a series of arrows reflecting the way your product flows. The best facilities provide a single direction, well-organized flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows go in numerous different directions, or double backwards in any spots or go in the opposite to the desired direction, then you have determined your inefficient spots.
When you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between source and destination, lessen bottleneck areas in the facility and re-vamp any forklift and high-travel congestion areas.
Cross-Docking? For items that rapidly move throughout your facility, consider cross-docking options. The cross-docked inventory is not stored in the warehouse. It is moved from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the sorting and consolidation is usually done within the shipping areas. The easiest objects to cross-dock are usually bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying expenses.
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