Wednesday 7 March 2018

5 Best Practices for Utilizing Your Warehouse to the Fullest



Indian manufacturing industry has witnessed the fast-paced advancement in past few decades and every manufacturer in the industry is participating and becoming a part of the journey. New tax policies i.e. GST has played a vital role in the manufacturing sector as well as in the development of the country by taking an initiative in the advancement of businesses.
Supply chain logistics has continuously changed and evolved, the warehousing sector has to advance at the same pace. The warehouse managers always faces the challenges of utilizing and optimizing the warehouse space. Warehousing plays a major role in any manufacturing industry and its costs are an account of cumulative costs of labour, inventory, finished goods, building, and land. Warehouses if not managed well are expensive to operate for the end companies.
To get the most out of the warehousing, a number of best practices can be opted to improve the productivity and overall process in the manufacturing facility. Although the best practices vary from industry to industry, there are some best practices from Daifuku-experts in material handling, warehousing and logistics management; which helps in utilizing the warehouse SPACE optimally and handle your products with care.
  • S - Scope for Expansion and Ease
  • P - Pace Up The Movement Of Units
  • A - Avoid Manual dependency
  • C - Carryout the Process in Flows
  • E – Escalate the Process
  • These elements will help you in utilizing and governing the process in the right direction. Each element is significant and complementary to each other. Implementing these practices can make an impact on your warehousing facility processes.
  • Scope for Expansion and Ease
  • With the faster pace of growth, there is also growth in land usage; this had lead to scarcity of land for horizontal expansion. This creates a desperate need of implementing the vertical warehousing, as the horizontal extension has huge investment associated with it. Vertical storage allows storing bulk items in a confined space and provides more space for store keeping units (SKU’s). To ensure the product stored in these vertical storages the automated systems are the simplest and advanced solution. The automated systems help you track down the items stored on regular basis and also favour the FIFO patterns. Maximizing space utilization can help with keeping inventory visible and easy to find.
  • Pace-up the Movement of Units
  • A plan should be such to allow free and fast movement of material in and out of the system without any loss or delays. The dispatch and receive movements should not contradict each other while in operations. Using the storage area with the optimal storing of items for the size (for example if a rack is designed for the units of 3*3 and is stored in the 2*2 unit, one has stored air in 1*1 area), if there is a fixed location for a specific bin one can free up space in the warehouse and company no longer pays for storing air around the items. Use specific containers like boxes, pallets, etc. for storing items which will help in utilizing the rack areas optimally.
  • Avoid Manual dependency
  • Once space is in optimal use, it is possible to elude manual dependency in the warehouses.  There are various irregularities in warehouses which are visible as well as hidden; the hidden irregularities cause more glitches than realized. One can avoid delays by ensuring the optimization of two elements equipment and personnel. Leveraging resources appropriately like utilizing time, labour, and manual functioning, as well as definite automated operations help to achieve the continual elimination of irregularities in the warehouse. The optimization of space utilization can prove helpful in ease of finding inventory, making it visible and avoiding unnecessary long travels times between the storage locations.
  • Carryout the Process in Flows
  • When a process is carried out in a warehouse there is a number of questions that should be asked; what are the volumes of units can be stored, what are the storing bin requirements for the units, what are the arrival and dispatch cycles of the units? One should carry out a proper analysis of the product before storing it. This will help in optimal usage of the stored area and the company can plan for storing other items in the warehouse for further usages and customer satisfaction. The analysis carried out should be based on the product flows in the warehouse, position of storage, the time duration of storage, tracking of the product storage. For carrying out such operations one can use automated storage and retrieving systems, tracking systems for the storage bins.
  • Escalate the Process
  • Following the four elements of SPACE, one can escalate their warehousing in a faster way which helps to achieve improved productivity for the companies. Automated systems help to minimize the errors in the systems caused in manual systems, helps to monitor the storing and retrieving levels to achieve significant growth in the efficiencies. Escalating the operations will lead in reusing the resources such as manpower in other operations as well the delays will be reduced and will bring customer satisfaction.
  • A final word
  • Optimized warehouse layout helps to achieve greater efficiencies, minimizes travel time, involves less manual dependency and helps to monitor the appropriate level of processes. Daifuku India helps to achieve the optimized space utilization of the warehouses in your manufacturing facility. Daifuku caters to a comprehensive range of products such as AS/RS-Unit Load AS/RS, Mini Load AS/RS, Racking Systems to its customers that meet their versatile needs in logistics and manufacturing. These systems increase productivity.
  • About Daifuku
  • Since 1937, Daifuku has been world-class Automated Materials Handling Company – conveying, storage, sorting, picking and controls. We have a global network of offices and subsidiaries that offer design, engineering, sales, installation and commissioning of an Automated Storage and Materials Handling System.
  • For more information, visit http://www.daifuku.com/in/

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