Warehouse Dispatch

Moving to a cycle counting system can revolutionize the way your company handles inventory. It can drastically reduce waste and ensure that you are on top of your inventory year-round. Over the years, inventory experts have outlined a few best practices that you should work into your plan from day one to guarantee success.

Cycle counting is an innovative solution for retailers who find themselves growing quickly and struggling to maintain accurate inventory counts. In addition, cycle counting offers a more convenient means of handling inventory counts without disrupting business for a full day or several days. However, there are a few things you should consider before you run out and try to implement a cycle counting program on your own.

When it comes to achieving maximum warehouse efficiency, sometimes you need to think beyond individual actions to determine how you can improve productivity while keeping everyone safe. Fortunately, there are a few innovative ways to deliver on both objectives without spending a fortune.

The single, most important lesson to be learned from your Warehouse Management System is that warehouse efficiency is a process, not an end goal. No matter how much waste you eliminate or how accurate you get, ongoing improvement requires regular revisiting on the part of your management team.

Getting Started

Warehouse Management Systems help improve warehouse efficiency by pinpointing areas for improvement. However, it is up to you to determine how you fix inefficiencies in your process. This requires some level of trial and error in the beginning as you test out different concepts. In the early days, you may check in constantly on a particular metric until you settle on the solution that shows the most promise. Then you'll move on to the next hot topic and spend some time troubleshooting there instead. But this is not the end of the line for your process improvement. The key is to work through each area of the warehouse methodically, without trying to change too much at once.

Your warehouse efficiency is a product of all the things that make up your warehouse workflow. Each element of your workflow represents an area ripe for improvement. In order to evaluate workflow, you should think in terms of contacts, steps, travel distance, and timeliness. These four factors interact with each other in your warehouse in ways that add to or detract from your overall warehouse efficiency.

Just because you took the first steps to improve your warehouse efficiency with a new Warehouse Management System does not mean your work is done. In order to make the most of your new technology, you will need to conduct ongoing analysis and make minor corrections to your operation as you discover inefficiencies. It simply isn't enough to gather data unless you are going to use it to effect change.

With integrated warehouse management technology, the concept of profiling orders to improve warehouse efficiency is within reach for many companies. Order profiling combines factors like item velocity with item relationships to create a system of rankings and a more effective warehouse stock pattern.

For the purposes of improving warehouse efficiency, a locations scheme or stock locator system is the way in which your employees will know where to go when they are ordered to pick a specific product. Stock locator systems can be either manual or automated with the help of a Warehouse Management System. Automated stock locator systems make for a more fluid system with far fewer errors.

There are many factors that contribute to warehouse efficiency. The degree to which each of these factors impacts your bottom line varies from warehouse to warehouse, but they are all important. Here are some of the top factors that could be slowing you down and impeding your progress.

In order to truly make a difference in your warehouse efficiency, you first have to understand how efficiency and productivity work together. While the two terms are often used interchangeably, they actually represent two different ways of measuring your warehouse output.

Warehouse Productivity

In general, it is easiest to start by measuring productivity. Productivity is expressed in terms of the quantity of work being done. Your WMS tracks the number of items being put away per hour and the number of line items picked. This is a purely quantitative look at how much work your employees are getting done in a given time period.