One of the things essential to customer satisfaction is warehouse efficiency. It, basically promotes productivity which is then the best aspect of any business and the grounds for making long-term contracts with your clients. Here are some tips for creating more efficient, productive warehouse operations.
- Communication is the Key
You need to understand that regardless of the position you hold, YOU are not the only link in your business chain. Without your employees you would be nowhere. This is why you need to encourage respect and communication among everybody who works at your company and share organizational goals and the processes with your colleagues. This is the best way to achieve them and establish effective warehousing operations.
Employee productivity suffers whenever fail to create an environment of open and clear communication, resulting in wasted resources and high turnover.
- Establish Standardization
All processes within your firm need to be standardized. You can easily achieve this by reducing potential variation in areas such as shift scheduling, unloading, facilities management, accounts payable and unloading. Standardization reduces errors and saves time and money.
- Measure what Aspects Contribute to Continuous Improvement
Once you measure what aspects contribute to continuous improvement in your processes you’ll know where you stand and what steps to take. Still, don’t waste time measuring it if the outcome is not important to your shareholders and customers.
- Driving Processes
To run a successful business, you need to know the proper causal connection between outcomes and enablers. This is easily established through determining what drives processes that lead to such outcomes. Nowadays, the answers to productivity are standardization and error proofing while key performance indicators reflect the past.
- Understand the “why” of your Operations
It’s important you understand both “how” and “why” of your operations. Use the DMAIC method to best understand these and establish a logic behind every move you make. Costly process variations will instantly be reduced with this five-step approach (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control).
DMAIC ensures sustained, defect-free performance and highly competitive costs and is the backbone of Six Sigma methodology.
- Empower, align and involve your associates
People you work with and who have an insight into your business operations are experts who can not only give interesting and helpful insight and feedback into what’s been going on inside your enterprise but can as well reduce or eliminate waste. A proper approach to your associates can significantly impact warehouse productivity. So, involve, align, and empower your associates.
- Get Proper Education and Robust Training Programs
Getting proper education goes for not just you but your overall staff. Get your leadership educated to ask the right questions, gather necessary information, take appropriate, corrective action and make decisions. This is vital to improving processes, services and products.
Further, a robust training program that incorporates cross-training is something you need to make a priority. New associates need to have an insight into the job, so break it down and present the operation to your new colleagues. Before releasing them to the process, allow them to test their performance. Even though the traditional sink-or-swim method is what most businesses are accustomed to, this one is definitely more effective.
- Equipment
Most of us make a drastic mistake when it comes to getting our businesses equipped – we somehow believe that getting absolutely brand new machinery will result in better results, when in fact this isn’t necessarily the case. It’s always better to rent certain equipment, at least until you get on your feet. Start with forklift hire – buying a forklift can be a huge expense while hiring one may be just as beneficial and so much cheaper.
- Process Optimization
A number of inefficiencies get embedded in systems of the firm and overall processes which contributes to business’ evolving. Make a deliberate effort to carry out optimization and regularly review the processes involved in your operations. Give your best to focus on eliminating delays and bottlenecks that mess with the workflow and increase processing time. Make efficiency your number one priority.
In today’s global environment, efficient warehousing operations are vital to a firm’s competitiveness. Your business can maintain high productivity levels owing to industrial operations management techniques and good organization.