The individuals who study warehouse effectiveness have found that approximately 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in nearly all material handling facilities. The main goal is to minimize lift truck travel distance and time in certain ways which truly help prevent damage to products and equipment abuse. Several of the most frequent efficiency barriers to numerous 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 space. The frequently handled objects are separated due to size or to storage handling requirements. Due to increased business, SKUs or Stock-Keeping Units have proliferated. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are lessened due to bad lighting. The forklift fleet is too small and a lot more round trips are needed using the same machine. Lift trucks experience detours and slowdowns because of poor equipment maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse design usually causes inefficient workflows and dead-end aisles.
If any of the above problems seem familiar at your place of work, or if you know ways to be much more efficient overall, there are 3 main areas to concentrate on:
Storage, Shipping and Receiving Layout: Use a facility layout and draw a series of arrows reflecting the way your product flows. The best facilities provide a well-organized, single direction 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 areas.
After 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 that rapidly 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 consolidation and sorting is normally performed within the shipping areas. The easiest things to cross-dock are typically bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying expenses.
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