Active floor supervision enables supervisors to improve performance in the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to recognize which employees may require more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits can be utilized to see who might 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 essential to the overall operation and very essential; lastly, you can deal with issues as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: First, you must determine the cube utilization in you workplace, making sure to check how much empty space is situated close to the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and certain forklifts which operate in those kinds of environments can greatly increase how you transport and store materials. What might not look like much wasted space can mean thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in more than a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. What's more, if you have lots of half-full pallets staged or stored in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much space can be made to accommodate faster moving things.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. About 60% of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can potentially have less staff finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to complete other tasks instead of having workers doubled up transporting things will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
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 time-waster is having the same SKU located in many places within the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a specific location for each particular thing so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling through the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes could greatly improve the overall effectiveness inside your warehouse.