Those who have studied effectiveness in the warehouse has found that 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in material handling facilities. The main goal is to minimize forklift time and travel distance in certain ways that really help avoid equipment abuse and product damage. Several of the most common efficiency barriers to a lot of warehouses are discussed below.
The new products would not always be placed where it makes the most sense, these products are usually stored wherever there is extra space. The regularly handled objects are separated due to storage handling requirements or to size. Because of increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or SKUs have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are lessened due to bad lighting. The lift truck fleet is too small and more round trips are required utilizing the same equipment. Lift trucks experience detours and slowdowns because of poor machine maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse design normally leads to ineffective workflows and dead-end aisles.
There are 3 main areas to concentrate on if any of the above concerns seem familiar at your place of work, or if you know ways to be much more efficient overall:
The layout of the storage, shipping, and receiving areas: Direct the way your product flows by utilizing a facility layout or by drawing a series of arrows. The best facilities offer a single direction, well-organized flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows go in many different directions, or double backwards in any spots or go in the opposite to the desired direction, then you have determined your inefficient spots.
Work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between destination and source, decrease bottleneck places when you have identified your trouble spots. This can be done by re-vamping any lift truck and high-travel congestion areas.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for objects 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 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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