Active floor management enables supervisors to improve performance within the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of issues.
It helps to identify which employees might require more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits could be utilized to see who may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that happens there and the workers to be vital to the overall operation and extremely essential; finally, you could address problems as they arise.
Determine the Use of Space: To begin with, you must determine the cube utilization in you workplace, making sure to examine how much empty space is located near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and particular forklifts which work in those types of settings could really increase how you transport and store materials. What may not seem like a lot of wasted space could mean 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 over a year, it is definitely consuming valuable space. What's more, if you have many half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using valuable space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, a lot of space can be made to accommodate things 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 exactly product flows through your facility on a regular basis. About 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could probably have less employees completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to complete other jobs rather than having workers doubled up moving things will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
Review how the order filling method is occurring. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location and orders do not require things 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 particular location for each and every specific item so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes could greatly enhance the overall effectiveness inside your warehouse.