The people who study warehouse efficiency have found that roughly 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in most material handling facilities. The goal is to minimize forklift time and travel distance in certain ways which truly help prevent machine abuse and product damage. Some of the most common efficiency barriers to many warehouses are discussed below.
The new products will not always be positioned where it makes the most sense, these products are normally stored wherever there is extra room. 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. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are reduced because of poor lighting. The forklift fleet is very small and a lot more round trips are required utilizing the same machinery. Forklifts face detours and slowdowns because of uneven floor surfaces and poor machine maintenance. Inefficient warehouse design often causes inefficient workflows and dead-end aisles.
If any of the above issues seem familiar at your place of work, or if you are aware of ways to be much more efficient overall, there are 3 main areas to focus on:
Shipping, Receiving and Storage Layout: Use a facility layout and draw a series of arrows reflecting the way your product flows. The best facilities offer 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 numerous different directions, then you have determined your inefficient areas.
Work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between destination and source, reduce bottleneck areas once you have identified your trouble spots. This could be done by re-vamping any forklift and high-travel congestion places.
Cross-Docking? For items which quickly move throughout your facility, consider cross-docking options. The cross-docked inventory is not stored in the warehouse. It is transported from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the consolidation and sorting is normally performed within the shipping areas. The simplest things to cross-dock are usually bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying costs.
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