Active floor management allows supervisors to enhance performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to identify which workers may require more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These regular visits can be used to see who may be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that happens there and the workers to be vital to the overall operation and really vital; lastly, you could deal with problems as they happen.
Determine the Use of Space: Start by checking cube utilization within your facility. Inspect if there is much empty space near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and specific forklifts which work in those types of environments can greatly increase how you transport and store materials. What might not look like a lot of wasted space could translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in more than a year, it is certainly consuming valuable space. In addition, if you have many half-full pallets that are stored or staged 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 could be made to accommodate things which are moving faster.
How is the Flow of Product? Check to see if the flow of products is both logical and sequential, by taking the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility on a regular basis. Roughly 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could probably have less employees finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to complete other jobs instead of having employees doubled up transporting things would get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
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 things of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big waste of time is having the same SKU located in multiple locations within the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific place for each particular 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 within your warehouse.