The people who study warehouse effectiveness have found that roughly 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in the majority of material handling facilities. The goal is to be able to reduce forklift travel distance and time in particular ways that truly help avoid product damage and machine abuse. Some of the most common efficiency barriers to a lot of warehouses are discussed below.
New product lines are stored where there is extra space, not necessarily where it makes the most sense. Frequently handled things are separated due to storage handling requirements or to size. Because of increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or SKUs have proliferated. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are reduced due to bad lighting. The lift truck fleet is very small and more round trips are required using the same machinery. Forklifts face slowdowns and detours because of poor machine maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Ineffective warehouse layout normally leads to unproductive 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 are aware of ways to be much more efficient overall:
Shipping, Receiving and Storage Layout: Utilize a facility layout and draw a series of arrows that reflect the way your product flows. The best facilities provide 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.
After you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, lessen travel distances between destination and source, lessen bottleneck places in the facility and re-vamp any lift truck and high-travel congestion areas.
Cross-Docking? For items that rapidly move throughout your facility, consider cross-docking options. The cross-docked inventory is not stored inside the warehouse. It is transported from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the consolidation and sorting is usually done in the shipping areas. The easiest things to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with high inventory carrying expenses and predicable demands.
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