Active floor management allows supervisors to improve performance in the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of issues.
It helps to recognize which employees might need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These regular visits can be used to see who may be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the employees to be vital to the overall operation and extremely essential; lastly, you can address issues as they happen.
Determine the Utilization of Space: To start with, you must determine the cube utilization within you workspace, making sure to check how much empty space is situated near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and particular forklifts that operate in those types of settings could greatly increase how you store and transport materials. What may not seem like a lot of wasted space could mean thousands of square feet and extra dollars with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. Furthermore, if you have numerous half-full pallets which are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much space could be made to accommodate things which are moving faster.
How is the Flow of Product? Check to see if the flow of products is both logical and sequential, by making the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility regularly. Around 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can potentially have less employees completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to complete other tasks instead of having employees doubled up transporting objects would get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
The order filling procedure should be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location. If orders do not require items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big waste of time is having the same SKU situated in many places in the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a particular location for each and every particular item so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes could greatly improve the overall effectiveness within your warehouse.