Regardless of the nature of your business and production set-up, the layout and floor plan of your warehouse is one of the most important things to ensure to get right; and conversely, one of the easiest elements to get wrong.
With this being said, continue reading to learn of some crucial key considerations when redesigning the layout of your warehouse.
Warehouse Management Systems
One of the most important and incredibly effective ways of not only redesigning the layout of your warehouse but ensuring optimum productivity and efficiency is to take advantage of the incredibly influential warehouse management system.
Warehouse Management Systems, or WMS, are essentially programs that can help ensure you design the layout of your warehouse in a way that is guaranteed to maximize efficiency and be as effective as possible.
There are a wide plethora of fantastic benefits to the implementation of a Warehouse Management System, including but in no way limited to:
- Significantly enhanced levels of customer service and thus customer satisfaction
- Reduction in required warehouse personnel
- Much better control of stock
- Substantially improved labor productivity
Outsource Your Warehouse Redesign
To ensure your new layout is as productive as possible and works towards minimizing labor as much as feasibly possible, you can make no better decision than to outsource the redesign to a reputable and renowned company with considerable years of expertise and experience.
Investing and working alongside such companies will ensure that your facility layout utilizes the Lean Six Sigma tools, which include time studies, process flow mapping, Spaghetti maps, Pareto analysis, and more.
Pay Special Attention To The Operation Flow
Every manufacturing and distribution company is different in a plethora of ways, one of the key differences being their flow of operations.
To best redesign the layout of your company warehouse, you must take into great consideration how the work flows currently and ensure that each individual operation within the workflow is situated as close as possible to the next. Cutting out unnecessary steps will greatly increase the efficiency of your workflow and thus is one of the important considerations when redesigning the layout.
Keep In Mind Accessibility
Essentially, accessibility concerning the layout of your warehouse pertains to the positioning of your goods at each part of the manufacturing process.
Arrange pallets close to the doors and ensure that any perishable goods and products are planned out using the first expiry first out strategy (FEFO). Products need to be produced and arranged according to how they will be packaged and subsequently shipped out from the warehouse and loaded into trucks.
Yard Management
Yard management is another key tool in determining the current effectiveness of your present warehouse layout and subsequently what improvements can be made.
Yard management involves the analyzing and monitoring of any and all activity, chronologically, in and around the loading docks and as the logistics staging area is one of the busiest areas of a warehouse, such areas must be carefully and studiously analyzed and managed.
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