Individuals who have studied efficiency in the warehouse has found that 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in material handling facilities. The objective is to minimize forklift time and travel distance in certain ways that truly help prevent equipment abuse and damage to products. Several of the most common efficiency barriers to a lot of warehouses are discussed below.
New product lines are stored wherever there is extra space, not necessarily where it makes the most sense. Regularly handled things are separated due to size or to storage handling requirements. Due to increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or SKUs have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are lessened due to poor 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 poor equipment maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse layout normally leads to ineffective workflows and dead-end aisles.
If any of the above issues seem familiar at your workplace, or if you know ways to be much more effective overall, there are 3 main areas to concentrate on:
Storage, Shipping and Receiving Layout: Utilize a facility layout and draw a series of arrows that reflect the way your product flows. The best facilities provide a well-organized, single direction 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.
Work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between source and destination, decrease bottleneck places once you have identified your trouble spots. This could be done by re-vamping any forklift and high-travel congestion areas.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for objects which rapidly move throughout your facility. The cross-docked inventory is not stored in the warehouse. It is transported from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the sorting and consolidation is often done in 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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