Warehouse Dispatch

When we think about quality control, we most often think of the process of manufacturing goods. However, in a warehouse environment, quality control actually refers to the quality of the orders you are shipping out. Since order fulfillment is your service, you need to guarantee the quality of those orders before they go out the door. Fortunately, adding quality control can actually have a positive impact on your warehouse efficiency.

In an effort to cut any remaining fat from your warehouse operations and streamline your processes, the idea of forward staging some items may have arisen. This practice helps divert some items from the regular replenishment stream and saves you steps. It can also help you save space by keeping fewer products in shelf locations when they are headed right back out the door. But how efficient can this process really be?

What happens when a corner of your warehouse is dedicated to housing stock that isn't going anywhere? The term dead stock is used to refer to products that have not sold in over a year, literally taking up space in your warehouse with no promise of return. There are several ways to approach dead stock items to free up your funds and your real estate.

Within any warehouse, each item passes through several stages. From the moment a product arrives at the receiving dock until it is shipped out to a customer, you should be tracking its movements. Ideally, your warehouse will be set up in a pattern that minimizes the number of individual moves a product makes within your warehouse and maximizes efficiency when it comes to put away and picking.

Here are the stages of typical item flow:

Any active warehouse has two main goals. First, you are looking to reduce your operating costs for a given level of volume. Secondly, you are looking to speed up your processes without sacrificing accuracy. Your storage policy and picking strategies directly affect how well you are able to achieve these goals.

When it comes to warehouse efficiency, we often think in loose, global terms. Everybody wants to run a more efficient warehouse, but we rarely think about the calculations that actually make up the warehouse efficiency picture. Boosting your warehouse efficiency requires more than just a vague idea about tightening up sloppy processes. It means deciding on a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be measured and tested month after month for effectiveness.

Of all the ways to improve your warehouse efficiency, one of the most effective ways to drive change is through real-time inventory control. Real-time inventory control provides for greater transparency throughout your organization. It can be used for both internal and external products to protect your bottom line.

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.