Active floor management enables supervisors to enhance performance in the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of issues.
By having management show presence on the floor on a regular basis, it helps to recognize which employees might require more training and which might 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 essential to the overall operation and really vital; finally, you can address problems as they happen.
Determine the Use of Space: Begin by examining cube utilization in your facility. Check if there is a lot of empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and particular forklifts that operate in those kinds of settings could really increase how you store and transport materials. What may not look like a lot of wasted area can translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you notice a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. Furthermore, if you have many half-full pallets that are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much room could be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. Roughly 60% of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You could potentially have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to complete other jobs rather than having workers doubled up transporting items will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
The order filling process should 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 huge time-waster is having the same SKU situated in multiple places within the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a particular location for each and every particular item so that they are simply looking in one place and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes could vastly enhance the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.