Active floor supervision enables managers to improve performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of problems.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to identify which employees might require more training and which might 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 really essential; lastly, you could address problems as they occur.
Determine the Utilization of Space: To begin with, you must determine the cube utilization in you workspace, making sure to examine how much empty space is situated close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and specific forklifts that operate in those kinds of environments can greatly increase how you store and transport materials. What may not seem like a lot of wasted area could mean thousands of square feet and extra dollars with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you notice a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. Additionally, if you have many half-full pallets which are 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, much space can be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
How is the Flow of Product? Check to see if the product flow is both logical and sequential, by making the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility on a regular basis. About 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You can potentially have less employees completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to complete different other tasks rather than having workers doubled up transporting things 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 place. If orders do not require items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more huge waste of time is having the same SKU situated in multiple locations within the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a particular place for each specific thing so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling through the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes can vastly improve the overall efficiency inside your warehouse.