Active floor management enables supervisors to enhance performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to recognize which employees may require more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits can be utilized to see who may be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the workers to be vital to the overall operation and extremely essential; lastly, you could deal with issues as they happen.
Determine the Utilization of Space: To start with, you should determine the cube utilization within you workplace, making sure to check how much empty space is situated near the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and specific forklifts which work in those types of settings could really increase how you store and transport supplies. What might not look like much wasted space can mean thousands of square feet and extra dollars with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you notice a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in more than a year, it is definitely consuming valuable space. Also, if you have many half-full pallets staged or stored in aisles, you are also not utilizing valuable space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much room can be made to accommodate things which are moving faster.
How is the Product Flow? Make the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Roughly 60 percent of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could potentially have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to complete other jobs rather than having workers doubled up transporting items will get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
The order filling procedure must be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location. If orders do not require things of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big time-waster is having the same SKU situated in many places in the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific location for each and every particular item so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes can greatly enhance the overall effectiveness in your warehouse.