An organized warehouse environment leads to increased efficiency, more accurate inventory and a positive workplace atmosphere. Therefore, warehouse organization can make or break a business’ bottom line.
Why is it important to optimize your warehouse?
Efficiency is key to every business. It every department of your company is well organized, the overall productivity of your business will increases significantly. When talking about warehouse management, the foundation you build determines how well your operation will run in the future. By thinking about warehouse optimization from the beginning you will set high-efficiency standards performance and capabilities.
Warehouse management is essential to any logistics system, which is an important part of supply chain management. Some warehousing process elements play a significant role in ensuring that the entire supply chain system functions efficiently. That is why organizing and optimizing your warehouse has significant financial benefits. Every year businesses lose bigs amounts of money due to out- of-stocks, returns, and human mistakes that could easily be avoided.
Warehouse optimization
Warehouse optimization is all about continually improving efficiency. It requires careful planning and execution. These are some steps you can take to optimize your warehouse in order to grow your business.
Warehouse organization
The first rule for optimizing your warehouse is to get every item well organized. You might start by mapping out the layout of your warehouse. Use your space’s full capacity to optimize the layout. When everything is well organized is easy to get job done faster and complete more jobs in a day. Not only you allow employees to work smarter, but you also save on overhead cost by not expanding the warehouse unnecessarily.
After you have optimized your space start to consider optimizing processes, data, and software.
Establish efficient processes
As a business owner or warehouse manager, your main goal is to ensure that the right product gets to the right place at the right time. In order to achieve this, your entire warehouse operation from receiving, to picking, to shipping, to data collection needs to be optimized constantly for improved results.
There are two ways for receiving products: manual and automated. In the manual checking process, an employee looks over a shipping invoice and visually checks that everything listed has arrived and has the right quantity. This method is cheaper but it increases the chance of human error. For that reason, in many cases, double-check are required which increase your company´s expenditure. By automating this process with some a warehouse management software, you can get reduces errors and save time and money. Using automation software, by simply scanning product barcodes you will upload all the information to your server.
Data collection
The purpose of data collection is to allow warehouse managers to see what the workers are doing well and what areas still need improvement. Having access to real time insights will keep managers informed about all the processes so they can take informed decisions.
Today, mobile device with barcode scanners are a very reliable solution to collect data. They can collect important data about every process in the warehouse.
Tools and software
To keep a competitive edge in any industry you have to be able to adapt and meet the expectations of your consumers. In an era of digital technology, you don’t to fall behind.
Barcode scanners, minicomputers, iPads, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) are some of the better known warehouse data collection tools. If your final goal us to automate your workflow, you will need to use the right tools appropriately.
Automation
Automation refers to identify repetitive tasks that are process-oriented, time-consuming, or error-prone, and finding ways to automate them. It also involves the use of software and tools to coordinate various departments in a warehouse while uploading and organizing data into a single platform. One of the main benefits of warehouse automation is speed. Warehouse automation doesn’t just speed up product retrieval, however; it also speeds up order fulfillment.
Managing successfully a warehouse means taking the initiative to increase the profits of your business. As the gatekeepers between business and consumers, warehouse management contributes to a company’s development and growth by taking care of the business’s products. Warehouse optimization widely contributes to the success of a company. By optimizing workflow processes and using the correct tools and software, you will minimize cost and optimize profits in no time.
When optimizing your warehouse and operations, always remember to work smarter not harder.
Thanks to companies which provide warehouse management software tools such as DataScope, you can improve the efficiency of your warehouse. All the information submitted by managers or workers is sent immediately to the headquarters for processing and you can verify when a product was sent and when it was delivery by checking all the processes.
DataScope is a platform which allows various industries to streamline, organize and evaluate the work of their field staffs thanks to online forms which provide real time indicators 100% adaptable to any field.
