To increase warehouse efficiency, you need to find a way to maintain a higher turnover while also lowering the number of mistakes made. The goal is a zero-mistake, zero-stock mentality. Follow these tips, and your business should see improvements in productivity and profit.
Two main areas can be improved to make the warehouse more efficient: mistakes made by company personnel or mistakes from suppliers sending inaccurate shipments.
Jump Ahead To:
1 – Invest in Better Training for Warehouse Employees
Mistakes happen, but if there is better training for all employees, including what to do when errors do pop up, it will save time and money spent on replacement products or labor needed for correcting mistakes further down the line.
Training to improve your warehouse efficiency should include mistakes that are made when picking products to be shipped. Using a visual system is necessary to ensure that the correct product arrives at the customer’s doorstep.
2 – Implement a Visual Management System
Using a well-designed visual system will help eliminate errors and make things a lot easier to track. The steps involved in tracking mislabeled shipments can be cumbersome and time-consuming, but this wouldn’t be any different if these steps were done manually by employees.
A way to get around this is to utilize a tracking system that visualizes the entire process through RFID and barcoding. This will ensure accurate inventory information for all products. When products arrive at your warehouse, you can scan the barcode and then place it on the correct rack instead of having to look at the package and manually figure out where it goes.
3 – Use Technology That Helps You Find Errors
Having too many products that are stored not just in one location but in several locations throughout a warehouse can be confusing, especially if you have many employees working there at any given time. You need technology that helps you find errors faster so they can be fixed as soon as possible.
This could mean using a lifecycle management program designed to help you find problems with product tracking right away or barcoding systems that are used with RFID technology.
4 – Reduce Inventory Through Product Identification
This can be achieved by using color-coded labels or barcodes that indicate best-by dates. With this system, you will know when products are reaching their expiration date so you can pull them out of circulation or phase out old stock faster than before. The more quickly your products go out of inventory, the higher your profits margins and the more money you have to upgrade your inventory stock.
5 – Create “Expedited Shipping”
When you need to get your products to customers in a hurry, use the tools available to you through barcoding and electronic data interchange. This means that information is put directly into one system instead of having to go from one location to another.
Stock control and time management are the controls you have to improve your warehouse efficiency.
