“ Improvement within warehouse picking and put-away have massive potential that can put your business ahead of your competition almost instantly ”
By Future StatePartners
Most of us working in the warehouse (regards less of the size) can very easily identify themselves fulfilling orders or receiving the orders one after the other. In a fast paced environment, there is plenty of chance to step back and think ways about better ways of conducting the order fulfilment. Even though we all are trying hard to get the day going as best as possible, there is definite need to start doing the things which we thought or spoke about (during those quick chats while picking, or daily meetings, during morning tea, lunch etc.)
During my exploratory visit to a warehouse for conducting Warehouse-Lean-Assessment, we discovered that there are so many ways the picking (both with and without forklift) activity was a key driver to the performance of this 4PL organisation.
On expanding my discussion further with the Managers of the site and Vice president of the contract, the current demand fluctuations has affected the both inbound and outbound side of business in such a way that time had come to start thinking about effectively utilising the people resources and the floor spaces, storage locations, forklift movements as well.
There is a huge opportunity for most of the Warehousing businesses to convert this opportunity into a competitive advantage. Speeding up warehouse picking and put away has huge potential to increase customer satisfaction, quicken the positive cash flow, reduce the cost of picking resources
This begs a question,why we are not able to make most of this opportunity?
We can think of many reasons behind it (please check out the infographic below). One of the key issues is most of the solutions that are available out there require huge investments,they take time to implement and adopt by the warehouse staff, in short, the benefits of the solutions (like automation, conveying etc.) are far fetched as well.
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How to lead theway and create a best-in-class warehousing environment?
A quick look at the infographic above shows, all the areas where we have lost a great deal of effort and time in this situation. The resultant in most cases is the whole environment suffers from increased walking, forklift movements, stock inaccuracies, lag in inbound /outbound ERP transactions, poor customer satisfaction, poor floor space utilisation, DIFOT , SOP Adherence,poor health of profit margins etc. as most of the resources are busy and heavily invested in performing picking plus packing
There is a definite need to think outside-the-box in such a way that picking resources have negligible walking and forklift movement. Our estimate says there is an opportunity to optimise the walking and forklift movements such that it can result in at least 50% gain in number of picks per day with the same resources. This itself can unlock a huge potential for growth and prove to be of significant advantage against your competitors.
One of the biggest challenges would be to come up with a cultural shift that is required to sustain any solution envisaged that stays longer, just like we did for this large Australian Supply Chain and Logistics organisations resulting in their increased ability to serve more customers with the same resources
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