Active floor management allows supervisors to enhance performance within 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 might need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits could be utilized to see who might be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and everything which happens there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and very essential; lastly, you can deal with problems as they arise.
Determine the Utilization of Space: Begin by checking cube utilization in your facility. Check if there is a lot of empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and certain forklifts that work in those types of settings can greatly increase how you transport and store supplies. What may not look like much wasted area could translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: For instance, if a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. As well, if you have many half-full pallets that are staged or stored 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 can be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
How is the Product Flow? Take the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. About 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can potentially have less personnel finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to finish other tasks rather than having workers doubled up moving items would get more work out of the same amount of employees.
Review how the order filling process is taking place. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place and orders do not require objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big time-waster is having the same SKU situated in multiple places in the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific location for every particular thing so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes could vastly enhance the overall effectiveness inside your warehouse.