Boosting warehouse productivity is one of the top priorities for warehouse owners globally. But as a warehouse manager or owner, what are the best effective methods for boosting your productivity? Well, there are so many variables in play, including labor, workloads, staffing, third party vendors, and scheduling, and it can be quite daunting to point out the exact areas to focus on to be more efficient.
What’s more, tweaking too many areas at once can be confusing, and instead of boosting your productivity can have opposite impact. While the best strategies for boosting warehouse productivity can vary from one firm to another, here are 3 tips that have been seconded by a bigger percentage of warehouse and logistics professionals.
1. Investing in a competent warehouse manager
Investing in an efficient warehouse manager with a great ability to manage various aspects of your warehouse can result in:
• Setting an effective warehouse management system for better real-time inventory control and improved productivity
• Understanding the type of cargo that your warehouse deals with and optimizing your storage space accordingly.
• Maintaining great team spirit as well as prompt and quality order fulfillment; this in turn backs up your sales process.
2. Tracking and communicating KPLs effectively
You can boost your warehouse productivity if you understand:
• Your baseline (or where you are starting from)
• Key metrics that you are using to measure your productivity
• Your target and how you are tracking your performance against those metrics
Although key metrics might vary depending on the type of warehouse you are managing, they should be fast and easily measurable. If you are going to spend over one week getting the data on the metrics out, then that’s not very useful. Instead, you can break your metrics down so that you can figure the key metrics that you should focus your energy and time on or the ones you can start driving some serious improvements on.
3. Implement Custom kitting strategies
Grouping and bagging items that are often used together into custom kits can go a long way in helping you reduce inventory handling time and optimize your storage space. For warehouses that regularly handle the same types of procedures, custom kitting can assist in cutting down on time-consuming errors and smoothen the inventory management process even under stringent deadlines.
Bottom-line
What separate professional Houston warehousing for rent services from mediocre ones is their productivity level. Whatever types of warehouse business you run, a big part of productivity involves having the right guidelines and regulations in place—regulations that are both logical and easy to grasp.
