Your warehouse productivity is directly linked to your employees' ability to get their jobs done quickly, easily, and accurately. By investing in the proper technology to make your warehouse run better, you enable your employees to accomplish more in less time. In addition, putting a strong infrastructure in place to support your employees shows them that you understand the requirements of their job and gives them the resources necessary to get things done right.

Cut Out Extra Steps in the Process

It is quite common to find that companies try to plan ahead for every single combination of events by writing convoluted manuals and processes with too many steps. Sometimes this means that employees are entering redundant information in multiple programs or manually entering information that could be handled by a barcode scan instead. The more complex your process is, the more downtime you will have and the more frustrated your employees will get. Warehouse management software is designed to take all of these extra steps out of the process and allow your employees to quickly scan and access product information without having to move between multiple programs or copy information to multiple databases.

Bring the Product to the People

One of the biggest time wasters in any warehouse environment is the time it takes to move between bin locations to find different products one-at-a-time. Employees who have to travel around the warehouse floor are limited in the number of orders they can work on at one time, and they have limited ability to improve efficiency by pulling multiple sets of like items for different orders while they are in that location.

By setting your warehouse up with vertical lift modules or carousels, you multiply your warehouse productivity by bringing the product to the workers instead of the other way around. Now a single employee can work on up to six orders at one time from a single location while picking all like items in a single pass before moving on.

Minimize Errors

Countless man hours and dollars are lost each and every year in the warehouse industry due to improperly labeled items, lost and misplaced products, and incomplete and/or incorrect orders.The right warehouse technology allows you to trim out all of these sources of waste by adding data verification and alerts to your normal operations. A proper warehouse management system will notify you of apparent errors, identify accuracy issues, and include an ongoing maintenance plan to keep your warehouse organized and clean. If your team is able to spend ten minutes a day checking accuracy and correcting small errors, they won't be spending two hours a day hunting for products that can't be found. Warehouse productivity increases when all parties are engaged in keeping things in order every day.

Warehouse productivity is a direct result of how easy it is for your employees to do their jobs and how well that job is being done. By giving employees the right tools for their tasks, you will see instant results in the amount of work that can be done by any individual. Once employees have access to the right tools, it is easier to include quality and accuracy checkpoints that will add to their productivity day after day.