People who have studied efficiency 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 forklift time and travel distance in certain ways which help prevent equipment abuse and damage to products. Some of the most common efficiency barriers to many warehouses are discussed below.
New product lines are stored wherever there is extra room, not necessarily where it makes the most sense. Regularly handled items are separated due to storage handling requirements or to size. Because of increased business, SKUs or Stock-Keeping Units have proliferated. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are lessened due to poor lighting. The forklift fleet is too small and more round trips are required utilizing the same machinery. Lift trucks experience slowdowns and detours because of uneven floor surfaces and poor equipment maintenance. Ineffective warehouse layout often leads to dead-end aisles and ineffective workflows.
If any of the above concerns seem familiar at your workplace, or if you are aware of ways to be 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 reflecting the way your product flows. The best facilities provide a single direction, well-organized flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows double backwards in any spots or go in the opposite to the desired direction or go in many different directions, then you have determined your inefficient areas.
After you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, lessen travel distances between source and destination, decrease bottleneck places within the facility and re-vamp any forklift and high-travel congestion places.
Cross-Docking? For items 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 performed in the shipping areas. The simplest things to cross-dock are typically bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying costs.
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