How to Increase Warehouse Productivity and Efficiency
Table of Contents
What are Warehouse Productivity and Efficiency?Understand Your Needs for Warehouse
Design Your Warehouse for Flexibility and Further Development
Summarize a Training Method from Warehouse Staff
Avoid overstocking by tracking inventory
Investing in quality equipment
Add Labeling Properly
Review Your Routes Regularly
The most productive warehouses have systems and processes that empower their activities to run like clockwork. But with so many moving parts, fluctuations in demand increased customer expectations, and other shifting dynamics, boosting productivity in the warehouse setting is often easier said than done.
There are many ways to go about improving warehouse productivity, from optimizing the warehouse layout to investing in updating the storage racking system or other warehouse equipment. However, what strategies prove most effective for warehouses when it comes to boosting productivity? To gain some insight into the productivity-boosting strategies, here HEDA summary of the below article.
What are Warehouse Productivity and Efficiency?
Warehouse productivity and efficiency are a measurement of how well you manage this conflict, together with factors like on-time delivery and warehouse utilization. The core is to help your business smoother and more profitably and enable you to grow and expand.
Understand Your Needs for Warehouse
Begin with a firm understanding of what you want your warehouse to do. What does your business need from a warehouse? No two companies will give the same answer to this.
Pay attention to your customer demand levels throughout the year. Average throughput and demand are frequently misleading, as most businesses experience greater or lesser demand for different products at different times of the year. This will lead to peaks and troughs in
throughput and stock-holding levels.
Design Your Warehouse for Flexibility and Further Development
Plan your warehouse not only for where your company is now, but where you plan to be in 5, 10, 15 years time. Make sure your new warehouse can accommodate expansion plans, new product lines and new technological innovations, without having to start all over again. Future proofing your warehouse in this way will encourage your company to innovate and expand as new opportunities arise.
Summarize a Training Method from Warehouse Staff
Ask the people who work in the warehouse to start thinking about it, and on a regular, periodic basis, review and discuss how they might work better.
The reason you want to ask the people working in the warehouse is that they are specialists in their work, more so than anyone else. But even more significant is that any idea has to be executed. Staff, generally, have already bought into their own ideas, and they’re more likely to be excited about ideas they’ve come up with. It will not only improve the warehouse flow and productivity, but it will improve their overall motivation and engagement. Lack of engagement is the #1 reason people quit their jobs. So get them engaged by asking them how to improve. It is a double win.
Avoid overstocking by tracking inventory
One of the greatest expenses for warehouses is overstocking items because excess inventory takes up valuable floor space. It's estimated that inventory takes 20 to 30 percent of its cost to maintain it. Equip staff with quality tracking devices to stay on top of inventory and reduce costs. Get rid of excess and regularly re-slot inventory to reflect customer demands.
Also, by ensuring accurate tracking of inventory, you make sure you have enough supplies to fulfill orders for the current month and the following month. If there is not a good tracking system in place, items can easily disappear, and customers can become frustrated if products are not in stock. It's important to find the right balance between overstocking and understocking.
Investing in quality equipment
Warehouses will often purchase equipment that is being sold at a cheap price in order to reduce their expenditure. However, staff cannot work efficiently without adequate equipment. Products like racking systems that regularly break will impact the amount of work being completed and, most importantly, may take a heavy toll on safety and labor. It might initially seem cost-effective to buy cheap equipment but cost should not only be monitored in monetary terms if you are running a warehouse; you should also measure cost in terms of productivity.
Add Labeling Properly
An informative label can mean the difference between an efficient and well-run warehouse operation and a receiving terminal filled with lost products and inefficiencies.
That vital information includes the pallet label and quantity, the case label and quantity, the product number, the description, the package count and the SKU.
Review Your Routes Regularly
You should schedule a review of picking routes regularly, led by warehouse management, with operations involved as well. The point of the review is to test alternative routes and see if the outcomes are expected to be better.
HEDA works for many businesses in e-commerce and logistics for good warehouse management. Let’s talk if you want to learn more about how HEDA professionals help your warehouse space optimization.
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