True Warehouse Optimization

Warehouses are a tricky thing.  They can make or break an entire business. After all, this is where the exchange of a product for profit takes place. Ensuring the efficiency of your warehouse optimization is incredibly important. Warehouse optimization will cut down the time it takes to get a product out the door and reduce costly mistakes such as mishaps and employee injuries. Let’s review a few of the many ways to optimize your warehouse.

1. Increase simplicity of Inventory tracking

More than likely, there is a large number of items with varying quantities; Each depending on the price and sales amount. Knowing how much stock of each item there is and when to reorder is incredibly important, but can also be very time consuming.

The easiest way to cut down on this issue is to implement an inventory management system. Inventory management systems allow items to be added into inventory as soon as they are received and removed whenever shipped or sold. This information is critical for inventory control managers to know when to reorder or have more of a certain type of product produced. If your business involves eCommerce, you can also display to your customers the amount of product you have left in stock.

Inventory management software, along with tracking quantities and re-order points, may allow for the location of a product to be marked in the inventory tracking system in order to reduce the amount of time spent looking for items. Properly displayed Location Labels allow for the purchased product to be sent off to consumers as quickly as possible.

There are multiple ways to implement inventory tracking:  1) Applications on mobile computers connected to the cloud to scan items in and out of stock. 2) Barcodes that encode data on the location labels that make putting away and picking items a breeze. Errors and mistakes are minimized with higher accuracy along with lower labor costs.

Learn more about warehouse Barcode and labeling solutions.

2. Warehouse Organization

Having a well-functioning system for warehouse storage is very important. If the number one or two top selling items are the most time-consuming

items to reach, warehouse organization should be rethought. Instead, track what items are most likely to sell and make them as quick and easy to grab as possible.

Likewise, put the slower selling products further away to make the least negative impact as possible on time efficiency.

Along with keeping top sellers close for easy fulfillment, making the warehouse easy to navigate.  An employee shouldn’t have to go out of their way to reach a different row. Instead, implement cross ways, (breaks in rows that allow employees to get from rows more efficiently). This will allow for faster navigation to get to their destination.

3. Proper Employee Training

It would be great if you could hand a new hire a training manual, and a few hours of reading they would 100% understand their job requirements.  In reality it takes a slight bit more effort than this. Peer to peer training that is hands on will increase the chances of a new employee remembering what proper processes are.

Warehouses are all different, but all can be optimized by using efficient inventory tracking, optimal organization, and by providing strong employee training. Taking care of the fundamentals will allow for more direct solutions and warehouse optimization to fall into place with ease.

For more information: https://huzzard.com/technologies-labeling-warehouse-labels/