Active floor supervision enables managers to enhance performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of issues.
It helps to identify which employees might need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These regular visits could be utilized 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 workers to be vital to the overall operation and extremely vital; finally, you can address problems as they arise.
Determine the Use of Space: First, you must determine the cube utilization in you workplace, making sure to examine how much empty space is located near the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and specific forklifts which work in those kinds of environments can really increase how you store and move supplies. What might not look like a lot of wasted space could mean thousands of extra dollars and square feet with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: For example, if a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. In addition, 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 re-organizing existing stock and doing an inventory overhaul, a lot of space can be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
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 precisely product flows through your facility regularly. Approximately 60% of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You could probably have less personnel finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to finish other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving 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 need objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big waste of time is having the same SKU situated in many locations inside the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a particular location for every particular thing so that they are just looking in one area and not traveling through the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes can vastly improve the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.