Warehouse Dispatch

How efficient are your warehouse processes? Every step in each process needs to be a target for improvement. Adopting certain best practices can help you improve warehouse efficiency while simultaneously driving down costs.

Safety is an aspect of warehouse management that cannot be ignored. Accidents and other safety issues can have serious and even fatal consequences. The good news, though, is that implementing safety measures not only protects your employees, but also enhances warehouse efficiency at the same time – a win-win!

Your operation is growing and your labor costs are increasing. Management wants you to do more with the same amount of money (or less) next year. You need to find ways to keep costs down while improving your operations at the same time. What can you do?

Physical inventories are typically performed once a year in order to determine the current inventory count and accuracy, fix inventory discrepancies, and locate missing products. Physical inventories may sound helpful, but they come with a number of issues that oftentimes cause more harm than good.

Your warehouse is a vital part of your company. If your warehouse is efficient, your company has a better chance of succeeding. That is why identifying and correcting common problems with warehouse efficiency is so important – you need to know what your problems are and how to fix them.

Cycle counting is far superior to physical inventories in most warehouse operations. Instead of shutting down everything once a year to count, the count is done continuously throughout the year to keep inventory numbers more accurate. In addition, a cycle count will tell you if a product needs to be reordered soon, if it is damaged, if it is aging on the shelf, or if it is in the wrong place.

If you were to take a microscope into your kitchen and look at your kitchen countertop, what would you see? More than likely, you would see a lot of microscopic organisms floating around. If you are not diligent in wiping the "germs" away, they will grow, causing illness and added expense in their wake.

Business is good, and your warehouse is growing – but your operations are struggling to keep up with the increasing production demands and customer expectations. Legacy systems, missing inventory, and inefficient processes are slowing everything down. What should you do?

Receiving an incorrect order is one of the leading reasons a customer becomes unhappy. Unhappy customers result in a potential loss of business and a lot of extra work. Most incorrect orders are sent back and fixed for free.

A study sponsored by Intermec back in late 2012 found that, on average, warehouse workers lose 15 minutes per day due to process inefficiencies. That may not seem like much, but it adds up quickly if you look at the bigger picture. Multiply that 15 minutes by all the days worked by the number of employees working and the result is staggering.