Active floor supervision allows supervisors to enhance performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of problems.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to identify which workers might require more training and which may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything which occurs there and the workers to be essential to the overall operation and really essential; lastly, you can address problems as they arise.
Determine the Utilization of Space: To start with, you must determine the cube utilization in you workspace, making sure to check how much empty space is situated close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts which operate in those types of environments can really increase how you store and move supplies. What might not look like a lot of wasted area could translate into thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: Like for example, if a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in more than a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. What's more, if you have a lot of half-full pallets which are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using valuable space to its full potential. By re-organizing existing stock and doing an inventory overhaul, a lot of space could be made to accommodate faster moving objects.
How is the Flow of Product? Check to see if the product flow is both sequential and logical, by making the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility regularly. Around 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could potentially have less employees completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to complete various other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving items will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
The order filling method should be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place. If orders do not require objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big time-waster is having the same SKU situated in many places in the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a particular place for each particular thing so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one location for the same thing. These small changes could vastly improve the overall efficiency within your warehouse.