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 main goal is to minimize forklift travel distance and time in particular ways that help avoid damage to products and machine abuse. Several of the most common efficiency barriers to numerous warehouses are discussed below.
New product lines are stored where there is extra room, 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. Replenishment and order-picking speeds are lessened due to poor lighting. The lift truck fleet is very small and more round trips are required utilizing the same machine. Forklifts experience slowdowns and detours because of poor equipment maintenance and uneven floor surfaces. Inefficient warehouse layout normally leads to inefficient workflows and dead-end aisles.
There are 3 main areas to concentrate on if any of the above concerns seem familiar at your place of work, or if you know ways to be much more efficient overall:
The layout of the storage, shipping, and receiving areas: Direct the way your product flows by using a facility layout or by drawing a series of arrows. The best facilities offer a single direction, well-organized flow from receiving to shipping. If your arrows go in many different directions, or double backwards in any spots or go in the opposite to the desired direction, then you have determined your inefficient areas.
When you have identified your trouble spots, work to improve access to product destinations, reduce travel distances between destination and source, decrease bottleneck places within the facility and re-vamp any forklift and high-travel congestion areas.
What is cross-docking? Consider cross-docking options for objects that rapidly move throughout your facility. The cross-docked inventory is not stored in the warehouse. It is moved from inbound delivery almost directly to outbound shipping. Some of the consolidation and sorting is usually performed in the shipping areas. The simplest objects to cross-dock are normally bar coded products with predicable demands and high inventory carrying expenses.
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