An efficient warehouse is a facility that reduces the costs of handling merchandise, increases productivity, and offers a five-star quality of service to customers. Making better use of space is one of many innovative ideas to improve warehouse efficiency. Let’s check some smart ideas on how to organize a warehouse to take the best advantage.
How to Organize a Warehouse?
When organizing a warehouse, take into account all the processes and operations that will take place in it every day, such as inventory management, order preparation, and shipment coordination. The objective of storage systems is to increase the efficiency of these spaces, reduce operating costs, and offer great precision and quality to the company’s customers.
One of the crucial aspects of classifying receipts and dispatches is to establish a distribution of items in order to identify and find them easily. Visible labels, metal parts storage cabinets and an efficient warehouse management system are some of the allies to achieve an ideal layout of these work areas.
Another of the best strategies to maintain control and advance digitalization is the use of warehouse management software. This program intelligently assigns locations, sequences tasks, and automates information flows, which minimizes the risk of error, provides real-time inventory visibility, and streamlines key logistics processes.
Common Mistakes When Organizing a Warehouse
Starting a logistics facility without prior thought or advice from an expert team often leads to the following problems:
- Inefficient design. If the path to pick or put away goods is not optimal, time and other valuable resources will be wasted every day. Consideration should be given to loading docks, space layout, and the type of shelving, robots, and machinery. In addition to causing bottlenecks, poor design often leads to overstock due to not allocating the correct rotation to products.
- Lack of knowledge of item location. If products are not labeled correctly or staff do not have warehouse management software to tell them where they are, all processes are delayed.
- Out of stock. When stock levels are unknown, and this information cannot be accessed in real-time, customers may not be able to receive what they have ordered.
- High return rates. If picking is not sufficiently optimized, professionalized, or automated, there are likely to be errors or delays in shipments, and users will be dissatisfied with the service.
What Are the Best Practices for Organizing a Warehouse?
Although each facility is different and may require a different set of solutions to reach its full potential, there are several points that, if followed, can greatly facilitate operations. Listed below are some of the ideas we recommend for organizing a warehouse:
Abandon Paper Management
Maintaining paper-based organizational systems makes it difficult to archive information for later reference and can lead to data loss. If you want to have real-time visibility into what is happening in your warehouse, abandoning this way of working should be one of your first changes.
Applying the ‘Lean’ Method
The Japanese philosophy of operations management and organization, known as the lean method, detects and eliminates activities that do not add value to the production process. Some of these are the accumulation of excess stock or unnecessary movements and travel.
Taking Advantage of Vertical Space
Beyond expanding horizontally or relocating facilities, there is the possibility of making the most of their height. Automated warehouses are capable of lifting loads using stacker cranes or pallet shuttle systems and can be built self-supporting up to 45 meters high.
Automate Processes
The rise of online sales in e-commerce and the birth of events such as Black Friday have led to the transformation of warehouse and distribution center operations. The use of automated systems such as picking robots helps operators overcome periods of high activity.
Using the ABC Method
The ABC method of inventory classification organizes merchandise based on its relevance, value, and turnover. A items are the most strategic, B items are replenished at a slower rate, and C items are the least in demand by customers.
Labeling Products
Identifying items according to industry standards through barcodes that can be read by radio frequency terminals facilitates the selection of the correct merchandise.
Preparing Orders with Cross-Docking
In the cross-docking strategy, the goods remain in the warehouse for a very short time between their reception and their subsequent distribution to the user. Allocating a small space to this activity rationalizes the storage areas and reduces the number of operations and the handling of materials.
Collecting Metrics
Gathering information about what happens in the warehouse helps detect possible inefficiencies, identify areas for improvement, increase profit margins, and reduce operating costs.
How to Organize a Small Warehouse?
When space is limited, warehouse organization ideas that can bring out the maximum potential must be kept in mind even more. Just keep in mind the three Fs of Function, Form, and Material Flow.
- Function – determine the operations to be carried out.
- Form – in a small warehouse, every inch can make a solid difference between the success or failure of a project, so it is recommended to use storage solutions that maximize space.
- Material flow – lacking additional square footage, these facilities are prone to bottlenecks, so planning ahead for how goods will move is required.
Conclusion
The warehouse is a vital facility for a company’s logistics activity. When choosing the equipment and its distribution, one must not lose sight of the fact that the objective is to satisfy specific needs that contribute to improving logistics capacity and operations. An efficient warehouse can be equipped with solutions ranging from manual to automatic storage systems. The possibilities are as wide as the needs of each client.
The post Smart Ideas for Organizing a Warehouse Efficiently appeared first on Container News.
Smart Ideas for Organizing a Warehouse Efficiently
