The individuals who study warehouse efficiency have found that about 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in most material handling facilities. The objective is to be able to minimize lift truck time and travel distance in certain ways that really help prevent machine abuse and damage to products. Some of the most frequent 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. Due to increased business, SKUs or also called Stock-Keeping Units have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are lessened because of bad lighting. The forklift fleet is too small and a lot more round trips are required utilizing the same machine. Forklifts face slowdowns and detours due to uneven floor surfaces and poor machine maintenance. Inefficient warehouse design usually leads to dead-end aisles and unproductive workflows.
There are 3 main areas to concentrate on if any of the mentioned concerns seem familiar at your workplace, or if you are aware of ways to be much more efficient overall:
The layout of the shipping, receiving and storage areas: Direct the way your product flows by using a facility layout or by drawing a series of arrows. 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 numerous different directions, then you have determined your inefficient areas.
After you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, minimize travel distances between destination and source, decrease bottleneck places within the facility and re-vamp any forklift and high-travel congestion areas.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for items that quickly move throughout your facility. The cross-docked inventory is not stored in the warehouse. It is moved from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the sorting and consolidation is often done in the shipping areas. The easiest things to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying costs.
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