People who have studied effectiveness in the warehouse has found that 50 to 60 percent of travel time is wasted in material handling facilities. The goal is to reduce lift truck travel distance and time in particular ways that help avoid machine abuse and damage to products. Several of the most common efficiency barriers to numerous warehouses are discussed below.
The new products would not always be positioned where it makes the most sense, these products are usually stored wherever there is extra room. The frequently handled things are separated due to size or to storage handling requirements. Because of increased business, Stock-Keeping Units or also called SKUs have proliferated. Order-picking and replenishment speeds are reduced due to bad lighting. The lift truck fleet is very small and a lot more round trips are needed utilizing the same equipment. Lift trucks face detours and slowdowns because of uneven floor surfaces and poor equipment maintenance. Inefficient warehouse design normally leads to ineffective workflows and dead-end aisles.
If any of the above problems 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 offer 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.
Work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between destination and source, decrease bottleneck places when you have identified your trouble spots. This can be done by re-vamping any forklift and high-travel congestion places.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for things which quickly move throughout your facility. 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 normally performed within the shipping areas. The simplest objects to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying costs.
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