The people who study warehouse efficiency have found that about 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in most material handling facilities. The objective is to be able to minimize lift truck time and travel distance in particular ways which help avoid machine abuse and product damage. Several of the most frequent 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 usually stored where there is extra room. The regularly handled objects are separated due to storage handling requirements or to size. Due to increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or also called SKUs have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are lessened due to bad lighting. The lift truck fleet is very small and more round trips are required utilizing the same machine. Forklifts face slowdowns and detours due to poor equipment maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse layout often leads to inefficient workflows and dead-end aisles.
If any of the above issues seem familiar at your workplace, or if you are aware of ways to be much more effective overall, there are 3 main areas to concentrate on:
Storage, Shipping and Receiving Layout: Use a facility layout and draw a series of arrows that reflect the way your product flows. The best facilities offer a well-organized, single direction flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows go in numerous different directions, or go in the opposite to the desired direction or double backwards in any spots, then you have determined your inefficient spots.
When you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, lessen travel distances between source and destination, reduce bottleneck places within the facility and re-vamp any lift truck and high-travel congestion places.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for items which quickly move throughout your facility. The cross-docked inventory is not stored inside the warehouse. It is moved from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the sorting and consolidation is normally done in the shipping areas. The simplest things to cross-dock are typically bar coded products with high inventory carrying costs and predicable demands.
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