Active floor management allows supervisors to enhance performance in the distribution center in 3 main ways. Be sure to regularly walk the floor to stay abreast of problems.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to recognize which employees might require more training and which might be the next to be promoted to a supervisory position; it shows you consider the floor and everything that happens there and the employees to be vital to the overall operation and extremely important; finally, you could address issues as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: Begin by examining cube utilization within your facility. Inspect if there is much empty space close to the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts that operate in those types of settings can really increase how you store and transport materials. What might not look like much wasted space could mean thousands of square feet and extra dollars with a few adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, it is definitely consuming valuable space. What's more, if you have a lot of half-full pallets that are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using valuable space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much room can be made to accommodate faster moving items.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how exactly product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Around 60 percent of direct labor within the warehouse is allotted to traveling from one place to another. You could probably have less employees finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move personnel to complete other tasks instead of having employees doubled up moving objects will get more work out of the same amount of personnel.
Review how the order filling process is taking place. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location and orders do not need items of this mix, pickers are wasting time. Another big waste of time is having the same SKU located in many places in the warehouse. Get the workers used of going to a specific place for every particular item so that they are simply looking in one place and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes can vastly improve the overall effectiveness within your warehouse.