Top 10 Best Practices that You Can Implement in Your Distribution Center Tomorrow with No System Changes and Very Little Process Changes

Implementing best practices in your warehouse is the key in increasing the throughput and productivity. Here are the best practices that you can implement in 2021.

1. Assign Ownership of Aisles to Operators So They Keep their Aisles Clean with Pride

Managing the operator’s aisle pristine and in an orderly way is necessary to increase the picking in the warehouse. When operators are happy and proud of the work they do – they do even better. To make them proud of the work they do install a display in every aisle saying “This isle is maintained with pride by – “operator name”.

2. Implement Daily Cycle Counts

Daily Cycle Count programs are a great way to ensure you maintain inventory accuracy throughout the year, and many companies employ a combination of daily cycle-counting their key products and count all products during their 100% physical inventory. The goal of cycle counting is to accurately count your inventory without spending too much time on counting. Picking accuracy and picking efficiency will increase after implementation of daily cycle counting program in your warehouse.

Increase cycle counting locations in your warehouse with simple yet powerful wearable scanners. Click here to know more.

3. Proactive Replenishments in Your Second Shift or Third Shift

Replenishment involves moving inventory from reserve location to active location so that it may be picked, packed and shipped. In the case of the item can’t be located quickly, or there is an error in finding or utilizing it, this small mistake can cause the entire workflow to break down. By proactively doing replenishments you always keep inventory in your active location which means your pickers don’t have to wait and picking happens faster and in an efficient manner.  Setting up a dedicated replenishment team with proactive tactics as listed in this article, you can avoid slowdowns in the picking process.

4. Maintain Single SKU Location

SKU management is the cornerstone of any good inventory management, as they allow you to effortlessly track your inventory right down to individual variants of every product (color, size, etc.). Assigning a dedicated location for each SKU in your Distribution Centre will help in quick and accurate fulfillment of orders. Maintaining one dedicated bin location for every single SKU will increase the picking speed and eliminates mispicks. Even if you cannot have dedicated locations for all the SKUs in your warehouse at least maintain dedicated locations for A velocity SKUs. This technique applied in your warehouse to at least ‘A’ velocity SKU’s improves picking efficiency and reduces errors.

5. Save on Your Supply Chain Chargebacks and Freight Claims

If you are 3PL or Retail Warehouse Shipping to Your Stores, or a Wholesale Distribution Center shipping to your customers this solution is for you. Avoid Vendor Performance issues, Chargeback issues while you ship an expensive product and if it gets damaged somewhere in the middle after it leaves your Distribution Centre which is not your fault. Use the LoadProof app to avoid these chargebacks. Just Install the app from the Android / iOS app store and go to Loadproof.com to register a new account and start taking pictures. You can start taking pictures of every product, pallet and the truck that you are shipping from your facility. We have customers that have save 20K in the first month by avoiding chargebacks. Visit Loadproof.com to learn more.

6. Keep Bin Locations Clean and Organized

Allocating an hour or two per day, to clean warehouse bin locations and also to nicely organize and stack the items in bin locations can lead to improvement in your warehouse efficiency. Clean and nicely organized warehouse bin locations mean employees can move around more quickly and get things such as counting and picking easier and faster. Quick cleaning on a daily basis enables your operation and every shift to be more productive and it is not very expensive to keep your bin locations cleans, but the benefits are immense.

7. Document Operator Travel Time

As a warehouse manager, you are always challenged to “do more with less”. Most attempt to meet this challenge by finding ways to labor costs. Many have implemented labor management systems to measure associates’ productive work, and some have gone a step further by adding incentive-based pay systems to entice higher productivity levels.

Only a few have spent the time to understand and manage a key component of labor cost: unproductive walks, or travel time. Measuring unproductive walks through a pedometer provides insight on the number of steps and the travel time that operators spend on which further helps with determining bottlenecks in the distribution center process flow. This program also reduces the idle time of each operator in the long run.

8. Perform Random Cycle Count Audits

Cycle-counting is an efficient and cost-effective way to ensure the ongoing accuracy of your inventory. Why wait until the end of the year to find out if your inventory counts are accurate when you can maintain precise inventory counts and valuations with random cycle count audits?

Keep in mind, the longer you wait, the more errors you’re likely to find and the longer it will take to resolve those errors. Random cycle count audits will ensure that your inventory count is accurately managed throughout the year, leading to greater throughput and more reliable reporting year-round.

9. Sensors, Lights and Operator Flow

Ensure sufficient lighting for operators, this helps in increasing productivity, and picking accuracy as they have clear view of the barcodes. Auto Illumination of zones where the operator travels, using light and motion sensors is essential in enhancing warehouse operations efficiency and also helps in avoiding accidents. The second part is to gain warehouse productivity by making sure the flow of operators is clear and simple.

10. Measure All of the Activities

What you cannot measure you cannot manage. For example, if you assigned an operator to perform cycle-counting or any other warehouse function for eg. sort boxes or move pallets it is important to measure them, so everybody working in the warehouse is held accountable.

Without measuring you will not be able to manage the activities they perform and find ways to increase the efficiency of operation.

 
 

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Originally published at Smartgladiator.com on Oct 9, 2019.

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Dec 2021
By Puga SankaraLeave a comment
Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
Puga Sankara is the Founder, CEO of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator LoadProof has been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. SG LoadProof is also an Enterprise System of Record for Photos, videos and any other digital documents for your Supply Chain Network. A system of record (SOR) or source system of record (SSoR) is a data management term for an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system running a database management system) that is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for new business use. In these cases, multiple information systems may disagree about the same piece of information. These disagreements may stem from semantic differences, differences in opinion, use of different sources, and differences in the timing of the extract, transform, and load processes that create the data they report against, or may simply be the result of bugs. The integrity and validity of any data set is open to question when there is no traceable connection to a good source, such as a known System of Record. Where the integrity of the data is vital, if there is an agreed system of record, the data element must either be linked to, or extracted directly from it. In other cases, the provenance and estimated data quality should be documented. The “system of record” approach is a good fit for environments where both: 1. there is a single authority over all data consumers, and 2. all consumers have similar needs Here, LoadProof is the System of Record for pictures and videos for all the entities in Supply chain who uses pictures and videos to track using any Supply Chain System infrastructure. 1. LoadProof provides accurate, thorough, complete, and latest information in pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply chain that is tracked. 2. LoadProof is the single authority on pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply Chain that is tracked 3. LoadProof doesn’t let any external system to copy the records being stored in it, which eliminates the data being duplicated in multiple places to preserve the data integrity and credibility. 4. LoadProof has a secured login procedure which lets only users with select level access to view the data and modify the records which helps in maintaining LoadProof is becoming the Industry Standard System for Photo & Video Docs for Supply Chain Smart Gladiator is located in ATDC - Advanced Tech Dev Center (tech Incubator) in Georgia Institute of Tech. Click for a demo - https://loadproof.com/apply Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com. [Read More]
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