Within the distribution center, active floor management can assist the managers to enhance performance in 3 main ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to recognize which employees might need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits can be used to see who may be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and extremely vital; lastly, you could deal with issues as they arise.
Determine the Use of Space: Begin by checking cube utilization in your facility. Inspect if there is much empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and specific forklifts which work in those types of environments can greatly increase how you transport and store materials. What might not seem like a lot of wasted space can translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: Like for instance, if a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. Additionally, if you have a lot of half-full pallets that are 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, much space can be made to accommodate items that are moving faster.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. Roughly 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can probably have less employees finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to finish different other tasks rather than having workers doubled up transporting items will get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
Review how the order filling process is taking place. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location and orders do not require objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another huge waste of time is having the same SKU located in multiple locations inside the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific location for each and every particular item so that they are simply looking in one place and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes can vastly enhance the overall effectiveness inside your warehouse.