People 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 be able to reduce lift truck travel distance and time in particular ways which truly help prevent product damage and equipment abuse. Several of the most frequent efficiency barriers to numerous warehouses are discussed below.
The new products would not always be positioned where it makes the most sense, these products are usually stored where there is extra space. The frequently handled items are separated due to size or to storage handling requirements. Due to increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or also called SKUs have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are reduced due to poor lighting. The forklift fleet is too small and a lot more round trips are needed utilizing the same equipment. Forklifts face slowdowns and detours because of uneven floor surfaces and poor equipment maintenance. Ineffective warehouse layout often causes dead-end aisles and ineffective workflows.
If any of the mentioned concerns seem familiar at your workplace, or if you are aware of ways to be much more effective overall, there are 3 main areas to concentrate on:
Shipping, Receiving and Storage Layout: Utilize 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 many different directions, or go in the opposite to the desired direction or double backwards in any spots, then you have determined your inefficient spots.
Work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between destination and source, decrease bottleneck places when you have identified your trouble spots. This could be done by re-vamping any forklift and high-travel congestion areas.
Cross-Docking? For objects which rapidly move throughout your facility, consider cross-docking options. The cross-docked inventory is not stored inside the warehouse. It is moved from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the sorting and consolidation is normally done in the shipping areas. The simplest things to cross-dock are typically bar coded products with high inventory carrying costs and predicable demands.
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