How To Improve Warehouse Storage and Efficiencies
Many customers ask how improving the operations of their warehouse would create better efficiency, but also increase your company’s profitability. We thought it would be helpful to provide tips to improve warehouse storage. Here are a few warehouse efficiency ideas for you to consider.
Understanding the metrics
Having the right metrics with you can help you greatly in the long run. Whether it’s average shipping costs or measuring business critical KPIs, the right numbers helps put your company’s operations into a better picture. This would also enable you to pay attention to what needs to change within your warehouse.
Improve your warehouse storage
Online shopping has been growing rapidly over the past few years. With increasing demand for a wide variety of products, come increasing inventory. Accounting for such changing inventory may be a challenge for your warehouse storage. As such, optimizing your warehouse will mitigate these issues and improve overall efficiency.
This could be adding a cantilever racking system creating alternating one-way aisles instead of two-way aisles. An alternating one-way isle not only gives you more warehouse storage, it also improves the stow and pick process.
Upgrade technology to mobile
Upgrading existing technologies can make a massive difference in company operations. This is particularly true for warehouses. Mobile technology for warehouses goes beyond typical barcode scanners. For example, a reliable Warehouse Management System (WMS) can make notable improvements with receiving orders and picking routes. Adding mobile devices with touchscreens, cameras and RFID scanners would further enhance the existing processes within warehouses.
Compared to the traditional manual procedures, upgrading to technology would ensure a far less error rate, faster operations, and reduced costs, making it an ideal warehouse storage efficiency idea.
Employ workflow audits
It goes without saying that your warehouse operations should have an established workflow. This applies from the arrival to departure of products/material and everything in between. But even if workflows have been standardized, there may be various bottlenecks that would cause problems. Audits can help identify these specific issues accurately and help with applying fixes.
It’s also important to remember that these workflows revolve around your employees. Thereby, effective communication with your employees regarding existing workflows would help achieve that operational efficiency at the warehouse.
Integrate Automation
Automation is another area you could consider. As businesses grow, manual processes become inefficient in dealing with larger volumes and workloads. Automation can optimize these to significantly improve productivity. Implementation can range from simply automated workflows to the picking process within your warehouse.
For example, automated workflows would enable standardized workflows to be implemented across the entire workforce in warehouses. Similarly, automating the picking process would translate to faster pick rates and efficient movement of inventory within the warehouse.
Conclusion
You can employ many tips for adding efficiencies to your operations. From having the right metrics to integrating technology. Taking the time to think through these warehouse storage strategies can pay off in the long run. To speak to one of our technical representatives, please call 216-229-9300.
