Active floor supervision allows supervisors to improve performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to frequently 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 regular visits can be utilized to see who might be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything which occurs there and the employees to be essential to the overall operation and extremely vital; finally, you can address problems as they occur.
Determine the Utilization 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 that operate in those types of settings could greatly increase how you move and store materials. What might not seem like much wasted area 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. Additionally, if you have numerous half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, a lot of room could be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
How is the Product Flow? Make the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Roughly 60 percent of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can potentially have less staff completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to complete other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving objects would get more work out of the same amount of staff.
Review how the order filling procedure is occurring. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place and orders do not require items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big time-waster is having the same SKU situated in many places inside the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a specific location for each specific item so that they are simply looking in one place and not traveling through the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes can greatly enhance the overall efficiency in your warehouse.