The people who study warehouse efficiency have found that approximately 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in the majority of material handling facilities. The main goal is to reduce lift truck time and travel distance in specific ways that truly help avoid machine abuse and damage to products. 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 often stored where there is extra room. The regularly handled items are separated due to storage handling requirements or to size. Because of increased business, SKUs or Stock-Keeping Units have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are reduced because of poor lighting. The lift truck fleet is too small and more round trips are required utilizing the same machine. Lift trucks face detours and slowdowns because of poor equipment maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse layout normally leads to inefficient workflows and dead-end aisles.
If any of the above problems 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 concentrate on:
Storage, Shipping and Receiving Layout: Utilize a facility layout and draw a series of arrows that reflect 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 many different directions, then you have determined your inefficient spots.
Work to improve access to product destinations, lessen travel distances between destination and source, reduce bottleneck places once you have identified your trouble spots. This can be done by re-vamping any lift truck and high-travel congestion places.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for objects which 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 usually done within the shipping areas. The simplest items to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with high inventory carrying costs and predicable demands.
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