Active floor supervision allows supervisors to enhance performance within the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of issues.
By having management show presence on the floor on a regular basis, it helps to recognize which employees may need more training and which may be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that happens there and the workers to be vital to the overall operation and very vital; finally, you can deal with problems as they happen.
Determine the Utilization of Space: To start with, you should determine the cube utilization in you workplace, making sure to examine how much empty space is situated near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts that operate in those types of environments can greatly increase how you store and move materials. What may not seem like much wasted space could mean thousands of extra dollars and square feet with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: For example, if a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. Additionally, if you have a lot of half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not utilizing valuable space to its full potential. By re-organizing existing stock and doing an inventory overhaul, much room can be made to accommodate things which are moving faster.
How is the Product Flow? Make the time to trace how precisely product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Roughly 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could potentially have less employees finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to finish different other tasks rather than having workers doubled up moving items would get more work out of the same amount of employees.
Review how the order filling procedure is occurring. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one place and orders do not need objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big time-waster is having the same SKU situated in multiple places in the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a particular location for every particular item so that they are just looking in one place and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one location for the same item. These small changes could vastly enhance the overall effectiveness in your warehouse.