The individuals who study warehouse efficiency have found that roughly 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in the majority of material handling facilities. The objective is to reduce lift truck time and travel distance in particular ways that truly help prevent equipment abuse and product damage. Some of the most frequent efficiency barriers to numerous warehouses are discussed below.
New product lines are stored wherever there is extra room, not necessarily where it makes the most sense. Regularly handled objects 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 lessened due to bad lighting. The forklift fleet is very small and more round trips are required using the same equipment. Forklifts face detours and slowdowns due to poor machine maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse layout usually causes inefficient workflows and dead-end aisles.
There are 3 main areas to concentrate on if any of the mentioned problems seem familiar at your place of work, or if you know ways to be more efficient overall:
The layout of the storage, shipping, and receiving areas: Direct the way your product flows by using a facility layout or by drawing a series of arrows. The best facilities offer a well-organized, single direction flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows go in many different directions, or go in the opposite to the desired direction or double backwards in any spots, then you have determined your inefficient areas.
When you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, lessen travel distances between source and destination, decrease bottleneck places in the facility and re-vamp any lift truck and high-travel congestion areas.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for things which quickly move throughout your facility. The cross-docked inventory is not stored inside the warehouse. It is transported from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the consolidation and sorting is often done within the shipping areas. The easiest items to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with high inventory carrying expenses and predicable demands.
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