The people who study warehouse efficiency have found that approximately 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in nearly all material handling facilities. The main goal is to reduce forklift travel distance and time in particular ways which help avoid machine abuse and product damage. Some of the most frequent efficiency barriers to numerous warehouses are discussed below.
The new products will not always be placed where it makes the most sense, these products are often stored where there is extra room. The frequently handled items are separated due to size or to storage handling requirements. Due to increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or SKUs have proliferated. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are reduced because of poor lighting. The lift truck fleet is very small and more round trips are required utilizing the same machinery. Lift trucks face slowdowns and detours because of uneven floor surfaces and poor machine maintenance. Inefficient warehouse layout often leads to dead-end aisles and unproductive workflows.
If any of the mentioned concerns seem familiar at your workplace, or if you are aware of ways to be much more efficient overall, there are 3 main areas to concentrate on:
The layout of the shipping, receiving and storage areas: Direct the way your product flows by using a facility layout or by drawing a series of arrows. The best facilities provide a well-organized, single direction flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows double backwards in any spots or go in the opposite to the desired direction or go in many different directions, then you have determined your inefficient areas.
After you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, minimize travel distances between source and destination, lessen bottleneck places within the facility and re-vamp any lift truck and high-travel congestion places.
Cross-Docking? For objects that rapidly move throughout your facility, consider cross-docking options. The cross-docked inventory is not stored inside 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 simplest things to cross-dock are typically bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying costs.
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