Active floor management enables supervisors to improve performance within the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to frequently walk the floor to stay abreast of issues.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to identify which workers may require more training and which may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that occurs there and the employees to be vital to the overall operation and extremely vital; lastly, you could deal with problems as they arise.
Determine the Use of Space: To begin with, you must determine the cube utilization within you workplace, making sure to examine how much empty space is situated near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and specific forklifts that operate in those kinds of settings can really increase how you store and move materials. What may not look like a lot of wasted area can translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. Additionally, if you have a lot of half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By re-organizing existing stock and doing an inventory overhaul, a lot of room can be made to accommodate items that are moving faster.
How is the Product Flow? Check to see if the product flow is both sequential and logical, by making the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility regularly. Around 60 percent of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You could potentially have less personnel completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to complete other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving objects would get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
Review how the order filling method is occurring. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location and orders do not require items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big waste of time is having the same SKU located in many locations inside the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a specific location for each specific item so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes could vastly improve the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.