Individuals who have studied efficiency in the warehouse has found that 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in material handling facilities. The main objective is to be able to reduce forklift time and travel distance in specific ways that help prevent damage to products and machine abuse. Several 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 items are separated due to size or to storage handling requirements. Because of increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or SKUs have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are reduced because of poor lighting. The lift truck fleet is very small and a lot more round trips are needed using the same machine. Lift trucks face detours and slowdowns due to uneven floor surfaces and poor equipment maintenance. Ineffective warehouse design usually causes dead-end aisles and unproductive workflows.
If any of the above concerns seem familiar at your place of work, or if you know 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 go in many different directions, or go in the opposite to the desired direction or double backwards in any spots, then you have determined your inefficient spots.
When you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between destination and source, reduce bottleneck places within the facility and re-vamp any forklift and high-travel congestion places.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for objects which quickly move throughout your facility. The cross-docked inventory is not stored inside the warehouse. It is moved from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the sorting and consolidation is usually performed within the shipping areas. The simplest items to cross-dock are typically bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying costs.
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