Within the distribution center, active floor management could assist the managers to enhance performance in 3 main ways. Be sure to walk the floor on a regular basis to stay abreast of problems.
It helps to identify which employees might need more training by having regular presence on management on the floor. These regular visits can be used to see who might be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and all goings on there and the employees to be vital to the overall operation and really essential; finally, you can address problems as they occur.
Determine the Use of Space: To begin with, you should determine the cube utilization in you workspace, making sure to examine how much empty space is located near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and specific forklifts which operate in those types of environments can greatly increase how you store and move supplies. What might not seem like a lot of wasted area could mean thousands of extra dollars and square feet with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: For example, if a stock-keeping unit or SKU has not moved in over a year, then it is considered to be consuming valuable space. What's more, if you have many half-full pallets stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much room could be made to accommodate faster moving items.
How is the Product Flow? Make the time to trace how exactly product flows through your facility on a regular basis. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Around 60% of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can potentially have less staff finishing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move employees to complete other tasks rather than having employees doubled up transporting objects will get more work out of the same amount of staff.
Review how the order filling method is happening. If you notice that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location and orders do not need objects of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more big waste of time is having the same SKU located in multiple places inside the warehouse. Get the employees used of going to a specific place for every specific thing so that they are simply looking in one area and not traveling all over the warehouse checking more than one place for the same thing. These small changes can greatly improve the overall effectiveness within your warehouse.