From accidents and human error dawdling deliveries to labor and surplus processes costing time and money, there are numerous challenges facing managers in the warehouse sector.
FREMONT, CA: With technologies comprising automation, asset tagging, warehouse management systems, and more, you can beat these challenges and make your warehouse more capable and cost-effective.
1. Warehouse layout
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There are a lot of causes for warehouse accidents, one of which is a witless warehouse layout. When your warehouse design and supply flow are optimized, management and workers are given more visibility over where goods are going to and coming from, ultimately decreasing the potential for accidents due to traffic or incorrectly stored materials or products.
You can present new technologies like automation to better your warehouse optimization through modular thinking, where common functions can be adapted as configurable modules for repetitive usage.
2. Inventory accuracy
With more high expectations from customers and clients, inventory tracking is becoming more critical to warehouse management, which minimizes the room for human error.
Failed deliveries cost time and money, and you're wasting even more with physical checks to correct errors leading to delayed shipments and mis-picks.
Improve your inventory management accuracy and lower your potential for downtime-inducing and costly mistakes by employing inventory tracking and asset tagging with an RFID system and warehouse automation.
3. Picking optimization
Picking is where a big part of warehouse management problems occur. Per Conveyco, walking and manually picking orders can account for more than 50% of the time associated with harvesting.
Where tasks are performed in a hurry, errors that cost time and money will disrupt your inventory control systems. Efficient picking will minimize your employees' time wasted and maximize your productivity.
A warehouse management system (WMS) will optimize by automatically generating picking lists and displaying the available inventory in real-time. These system resource pickers can see the status of orders when they come in to see when requirements will increase.
You can also enhance your processes by tracking metrics such as time to ship, total units to storage, determining accuracy, warehouse capacity, and inventory turnover. With these measurements in place, managers can decide which areas perform better than others and which stages need further work.
4. Labour costs
Increasing productivity while reducing labor costs is a balancing act for many warehouse managers. Using expensive equipment and large labor forces, from cleaners and packers to managers and administrators, has become a bigger issue due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of social distancing and vulnerable staff members.
Through automated systems, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) can take on repetitive manual tasks, guaranteeing employees can focus on more important, strategic tasks.
AGVs track digital paths through a warehouse and can load and unload pallets, boxes, and other containers for more efficient and cost-effective handling of goods.
5. Redundant processes
With most warehouses acting several operations in several workflows at one time, it becomes increasingly likely that some actions, such as sorting, may repeat unnecessarily, increasing labor costs and taking up time you don't have.
Automation can make the process quicker and speed by deleting unnecessary or obsolete steps, ultimately improving client experience and reducing costs.
Warehouse managers confront many challenges as we begin 2022, but with new technologies constantly developing, they can meet them head-on. From AGVs presenting efficient automation to WMS improving picking optimization and warehouse layout, you can get ahead of these challenges with full visibility and control over all operations.
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