A warehouse has to laid out and labelled in the most optimal way. But this now raises the question: How do you determine the exact location each product should be stored? The answer: Keep better selling products closer to the packing desk. One research over 20000 retailers found that 60% of a company’s sales tend to come from just 20% of their products. Meaning you can severely reduce picker walking time by Identifying that 20% of products from past sales data in your business; and then storing these as close to the packing desk as possible. Tools like ABC Analysis tend to be used more in inventory management. But this can provide some handy information when it comes to this part of warehouse management too. Divide all on-hand inventory into three groups – A, B and C:
A Items: Are of high value with low sales frequency.
B Items: Are of moderate value with moderate sales frequency.
C Items: Are of low value with high sales frequency
You can then decide that ‘C items’ will be placed closest to the packing desk, while ‘A items’ will be farthest away.
Like this:
Some small and lightweight items may even be sold frequently enough to warrant being stored on shelves above the packing desks themselves. This means packers can quickly add these into relevant orders and pickers can focus on bigger items.
Finally, you can take this concept another layer deep by also identifying which products are most commonly sold together. So faster selling products are stored closer to the packing desk and products commonly purchased together are stored close or next to each other. Meaning you’re doubling down on reducing walking time for each picker.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO RE-ARRANGE
Don’t be afraid to rearrange your warehouse. Yes – it can take time and resources to implement and may seem like more hassle than it’s worth. But an optimally arranged warehouse can save bags of time overall and severely reduce costs for entirety of your supply chain management.
While inefficiencies can seriously hamper growth. So regularly evaluate and – if necessary – rearrange or upgrade. For example, it may be that your best-selling products in summer become your worst selling come winter, and vice versa. Or you sell more of specific products on Valentine’s Day or other key retail dates through the year.
So, it makes sense to rearrange these products in line with this when the time comes – moving some closer to the packing desks and others farther away.
SOME OF THE KEY NOTES
1. Keep your warehouse clean
Allocating an hour or two per week, or even per month, to cleaning the warehouse can lead to amazing improvement in your efficiency. You never know what missing or misplaced orders you might find. [In addition] a clean warehouse means employees can move around more quickly and get things done easier. It’s just common sense.
2. Adopt Lean inventory practices
Maintaining a lean inventory means that you only keep around what you actually need and nothing more. This gives your workers fewer products to sift through when organizing freight, completing order fulfilment services, and more. Try reducing your safety stocks, if possible, or see if you can get your suppliers to deliver smaller loads on a more frequent basis. As long as the costs add up correctly, you can greatly improve your efficiency with a lean inventory.
3. Top Priority: Organize for Safety
When it comes down to it, safety is priority when it comes to a warehouse – after safety, you can think about efficiency. The last thing you want to do is put your warehouse workers in danger – just to boost your profit margins. When it comes down to it, a safe warehouse is an efficient warehouse.
4. Assess Shelf and Space Utilization
When trying to look for ways to improve the efficiency of your warehouse, a good plan is to understand the way that shelves and space are being utilized. The placement of shelves and containers, along with the traffic patterns and total design of the building ultimately affects the ability for you to utilize any space available.”
5. Keep track of inventory error rates
Even in the most efficient and organized warehouse, pick and pack errors will be made from time to time. Keeping track of what kinds of mistakes are being made, and how often, can provide key insights into areas where there might be room for improvement.
6. Organize the shipping station for efficiency
Time yourself or a partner going through the process of packing a product for shipment. Are the scissors, packaging, and tape materials all together in a bin for easy access? Are the FedEx boxes in the right place? Do you need to move the scale, or pre-build some boxes? Do you find there is a lot of physical backtracking through the process from start to final label, or are you able to have a streamlined assembly? Where can you cut steps, literally and figuratively, to save time and money?
7. Regularly train warehouse staff
“There are two solutions required to keep a warehouse organized. The first is to do regular trainings with your warehouse staff on the importance of keeping the warehouse organized and using the tools in place to keep your inventory system up to date. Keeping the warehouse organized becomes part of the corporate culture when it is the subject of mandatory training sessions.”
8. Implement cycle counts
“Instead of taking a single large inventory once a year, adopt a cycle counting system where inventory is routinely counted one or more times in a given cycle. The cycle can be each month, each quarter, or any other time period you choose. This helps keep inventory numbers far more accurate as well as helps identify missing stock and put away errors.” Your goal should be 98-100% Inventory Records Accuracy Daily.
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Note: Above views are purely written based on my own individual experience through various industries & based on that above points have been came out. Also gone through various books & Reference sites before conclude. Hence before implementing, pls. review & decide whether it suits/align to your requirements or not.
