Within the distribution center, active floor management could assist the supervisors to improve performance in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of issues.
By having management show presence on the floor on a regular basis, it helps to identify which workers may need more training and which might be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the workers to be vital to the overall operation and extremely important; lastly, you can address problems as they happen.
Determine the Use of Space: To start with, you should determine the cube utilization in you workspace, making sure to examine how much empty space is located close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts that operate in those types of environments can really increase how you store and move materials. What may not seem like a lot of wasted area could mean thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: Like for instance, if a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in more than a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. As well, if you have numerous half-full pallets staged or stored in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By re-organizing existing stock and doing an inventory overhaul, a lot of space can be made to accommodate things that are moving faster.
How is the Product Flow? Make the time to trace how exactly product flows through your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Roughly 60% of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can potentially have less staff finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to finish other tasks rather than having personnel doubled up transporting things would get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
Review how the order filling method is occurring. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place and orders do not require things of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big time-waster is having the same SKU situated in many locations in the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a particular location for every specific thing so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling through the warehouse checking more than one location for the same thing. These small changes could vastly enhance the overall efficiency within your warehouse.