Active floor management enables supervisors to enhance performance in the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of problems.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to identify which employees might require more training and which may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and extremely essential; finally, you can deal with issues as they arise.
Determine the Utilization of Space: Begin by checking cube utilization in your facility. Check if there is much empty space near the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and particular forklifts which work in those types of settings can really increase how you transport and store supplies. What may not look like a lot of wasted area could translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in more than a year, it is definitely consuming valuable space. Furthermore, if you have lots of half-full pallets that are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing valuable space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, a lot of space could be made to accommodate items which are moving faster.
How is the Product Flow? Check to see if the product flow is both logical and sequential, by making the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Roughly 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can probably have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to complete other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving objects would get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
The order filling method should be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location. If orders do not need things of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big time-waster is having the same SKU located in many locations in the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a specific location for each specific item so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes can greatly enhance the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.