The individuals who study warehouse effectiveness have found that roughly 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in most material handling facilities. The objective is to minimize lift truck time and travel distance in certain ways which really help prevent damage to products and machine abuse. Some of the most common 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 normally stored where there is extra space. The regularly handled things are separated due to storage handling requirements or to size. Because of increased business, SKUs or Stock-Keeping Units have proliferated. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are lessened due to bad lighting. The forklift fleet is very small and a lot more round trips are required utilizing the same machinery. Lift trucks experience slowdowns and detours because of uneven floor surfaces and poor machine maintenance. Ineffective warehouse layout usually causes dead-end aisles and ineffective workflows.
If any of the mentioned issues seem familiar at your place of work, or if you know ways to be more efficient overall, there are 3 main areas to concentrate on:
The layout of the storage, shipping, and receiving areas: Direct the way your product flows by utilizing a facility layout or by drawing a series of arrows. The best facilities provide a single direction, well-organized flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows go in numerous different directions, or double backwards in any spots or go in the opposite to the desired direction, then you have determined your inefficient areas.
Work to improve access to product destinations, minimize travel distances between destination and source, decrease bottleneck places when you have identified your trouble spots. This can be done by re-vamping any lift truck and high-travel congestion places.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for items that quickly move throughout your facility. The cross-docked inventory is not stored in the warehouse. It is transported from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the consolidation and sorting is often done in the shipping areas. The easiest things to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying costs.
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