Active floor supervision enables supervisors to improve performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to frequently walk the floor to stay abreast of issues.
It helps to identify which workers may need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits could be used to see who might be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the employees to be vital to the overall operation and extremely important; finally, you could deal with problems as they happen.
Determine the Utilization of Space: Begin by checking cube utilization in your facility. Check if there is a lot of empty space near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts that operate in those kinds of settings could greatly increase how you store and transport supplies. What might not look like a lot of wasted area can translate into thousands of square feet and extra dollars with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: Like for example, if a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in more than a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. Also, if you have many half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing valuable space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much space can be made to accommodate faster moving things.
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 exactly product flows through your facility regularly. Roughly 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could potentially have less employees finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to finish various other tasks rather than having workers doubled up transporting items would get more work out of the same amount of staff.
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 require objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more huge waste of time is having the same SKU located in many locations within the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a specific location for each specific item so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling through the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes can vastly enhance the overall effectiveness in your warehouse.