In the distribution center, active floor management could help the managers to improve performance in 3 main ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to recognize which workers may require more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These frequent visits could be utilized to see who may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the workers to be vital to the overall operation and extremely important; finally, you could address problems as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: To start with, you should determine the cube utilization in you workspace, making sure to examine how much empty space is situated close to the ceiling. Implementing higher racks and narrow aisles and specific forklifts that work in those types of environments could greatly increase how you store and move supplies. What might not look like a lot of wasted area can mean thousands of square feet and extra dollars with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: 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. Additionally, if you have numerous half-full pallets staged or stored in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much room can be made to accommodate faster moving items.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how precisely product flows in your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is logical and sequential. Roughly 60% of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You could probably have less personnel completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to complete other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving objects will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
The order filling procedure must be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place. If orders do not need items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another huge time-waster is having the same SKU located in multiple places in the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific place for each specific thing 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 could vastly improve the overall effectiveness within your warehouse.