5 Result-Yielding Warehouse Management Methods Overlooked by Businesses
If you wonder how to manage warehouse operations, the following warehouse organization tips can help a great deal.
You’ve got your staffing right, enough of storage space to stock products, great procurement partners, fulfillment team and enough demand for the commodities you sell. Well, all these are not just enough for your supply chain lifecycle to be a frictionless.
What you will still be needing is perfect warehouse management method that works well for your business. It can differ based on the products you deal with but there are a few warehouse management techniques which can unanimously be followed retail businesses to streamline warehouse operations.
If you wonder how to manage warehouse operations, the following warehouse organization tips can help a great deal.
Your Fulfillment Team’s Picking Method
It is of prime importance that your fulfillment team’s picking method should be smart enough to save time spent on location products within warehouses. For this two basic warehouse management techniques for picking improvisation which are i) BIN Location and ii) Navigation.
Direction signs, signboards, labels which indicate what is placed where can avoid confusions in walking down to the wrong aisle. On the other hand, storing BIN location information of every product in your warehouse along with other information, can help in directly picking up from the rack it is in.
One of the warehouse management new techniques which is now being used by Amazon is ‘Automate Picking’ through robots. Amazon deploys Kiva Robots to pick and deliver products orders to the packing zone which reportedly said to have reduced the company’s order processing time by more than 30 minutes.
Making the Most of the Available Storage Space
Space utilization is one of the warehouse management methods which helps in making the most of the available space without expanding, which means, without shelling out additional money. Warehouse space planning will have to be done base on the product portfolio.
Mezzanine flooring, using up the vertical space of a warehouse and revamping racks can prove useful in digging out more space out of the existing one. These practices can help in clearly defining each storage location which leads to more organized warehouse structure which is very much known to the management staffs.
Tracking and Communicating KPIs
Businesses generally track key performance indicators but this warehouse management method doesn’t end with that. Communicating it to the base-level management staff is something which is often overlooked and kept for higher level managerial hierarchy.
Letting your management staffs know about the key performance indicators individually or team-wise can bring in a significant change in your warehouse productivity. First of all, to know the metrics, you should define the baseline and make sure what are all the metrics that will reveal improvements.
The performance indicators must be easily measurable. For instance, due date performance or time taken to retrieve products from storage locations to the packing department can be measured to re strategize operations involved in between for achieving betterment.
Learn From the Baseline
The above discussed warehouse management techniques depend upon observation but the one we are going to discuss now is purely based on knowing your staff expectations. If you wonder how to manage warehouse operations by introducing techniques that are loved by your management staffs, you’ll have to listen to their ideas first.
Warehouse management staffs are those which do the learning, adopt themselves and perform fulfillment activities. So, they can provide warehouse organization tips which when implemented can be instantly adopted by them as they will be excited to experience their suggestions being considered right away.
Icing on the Cake - A Perfect Warehouse Management System
If you are still dealing with hard copies to make a note of your warehouse operations you will be considered an alien. Digitalization of your warehouse operations has become a minimum requirement just to stay in the game and to do it you need a warehouse management system in place.
A can help in automating processes which are prone to human errors to improve accuracy. These systems can pave way to find warehouse management new techniques by providing insight on warehouse operations in various angles.
Multiple warehouse management, stock transfers within warehouses, BIN location information storing, order status updates, real-time inventory updates, alerts for low stocks and much more are the benefits that come along with digitizing your warehouse operations.
To streamline warehouse operations the above discussed warehouse management methods can be helpful but as a matter of fact, these methods have to be personalized considering the products, scale and demands in order to obtain best results.