Within the distribution center, active floor management can help the supervisors to improve performance in 3 key ways. Be sure to frequently walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to identify which workers might require 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 essential to the overall operation and extremely vital; lastly, you could deal with issues as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: First, you should determine the cube utilization in you workplace, making sure to check how much empty space is situated close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and specific forklifts which work in those types of environments can greatly increase how you store and transport supplies. What may not seem like much wasted space could translate into thousands of square feet and extra dollars with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: Like 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. Also, if you have many half-full pallets that are staged or stored in aisles, you are also not utilizing available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much space could be made to accommodate faster moving items.
How is the Product Flow? Check to see if the product flow is both logical and sequential, by making the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility regularly. 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 rather than having employees doubled up transporting things will get more work out of the same amount of employees.
Review how the order filling process is occurring. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place and orders do not require objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more huge time-waster is having the same SKU situated in multiple locations inside the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a particular location for 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 could vastly improve the overall effectiveness inside your warehouse.