Assume you’ve just finished setting up your new warehouse. You’ve done your research: you know your expansion plans, your current and target markets, how the goods/services you sell influence where the best place to put a storage unit is, and you’ve found the ideal location that meets all of your business needs. Now that you’ve got your warehouse, you need to know how to operate it. What is required to manage a warehouse? What kinds of tasks should you keep track of to ensure everything runs smoothly?
Warehouse management, in essence, refers to the efficient use of available space and time to operate your inventory.
To make the best use of space and resources, items and equipment must be stored in a manner that corresponds to the sequence of your warehouse workflow processes. The goal is to ensure better control over the uninterrupted movement of materials, people, and traffic, thereby reducing cross-flow clashes.
To assist you with this, we will focus on the following aspects that contribute to the efficiency of your warehouse:
Organizing items according to movement and relevance.
Implementing measures to reduce warehouse storage hazards.
Locator systems help to improve item picking efficiency.
Understanding the advantages of using a flow-compatible WMS.
Organizing items according to movement and relevance
Consider a supermarket that is completely packed with items. In terms of speed, here’s a breakdown of how grocery products move in and out of a store, from fastest to slowest:
Fruits, vegetables, and dairy products > general provisions like wheat flour or ketchup > cosmetics like body sprays and talcum powders > household items like towels and mops.
Customers prefer to find fast-moving items without having to walk the entire length of the store. This also makes sense from a storekeeper’s perspective, as it is much easier for employees to restock items near the front of the store as soon as they receive goods from vendors.
The same principle applies to the items in your warehouse: it is more efficient to store seasonal and popular items in easily accessible areas, such as near loading bays for easy picking and storing, and off-season items in less accessed sections of the warehouse.
In some cases, the same item may come in multiple sizes. When this occurs, slots of various sizes will be required to accommodate all of these. Larger, faster-moving items require larger slots that are easily accessible. However, this would necessitate placing slower-moving, smaller objects farther into the warehouse. To optimise your picking cycle, aim to strike a balance between movement and size, with smaller, fast-moving items placed near the loading bays and faster, larger items stored in slots close behind the smaller ones.
It’s also important to consider items that you frequently buy together. Placing them as close together as possible will help you save time finding and picking them.
Implementing measures to reduce storage hazards.
Inside a warehouse, safety must always be the top priority. To better understand this, consider the supermarket example, where we encounter items with varying life cycles and properties.
Some items are flammable or corrosive in nature, such as cooking oil and sanitary cleaners, while others are perishable and prone to contamination if not stored under controlled conditions. In a well-organized supermarket, items such as bathroom cleaners and bleaching agents are kept as far away from edible products as possible to avoid contamination from a spill or leak. The same rule applies when storing flammables like oils and wax candles, as well as combustibles like paper and other stationery supplies.
Warehouses adhere to similar safety standards when storing reactive items. Hazardous materials must be isolated and stored separately from materials that may react with them. When storing corrosives and chemicals, always carefully read and follow the manufacturer’s Safety Data Sheets. Install safety labels and use reflective markings and panels to help your personnel identify zones containing hazardous materials.
Ensure that your warehouse’s safety equipment, such as firefighting systems (sprinklers, hydrants, etc.), ventilation systems (blowers and isolation covers), and spill control mechanisms (drainage sinks, insulated holding trays, etc.), are always accessible and operational. They will assist you in saving lives and minimizing property damage in the event of a compromised incident.
Enhancing item-picking efficiency with locator systems
Consider a busy day with a high volume of orders of varying priority levels. To fulfil these, items will be removed from their designated slots and transported to a sorting facility within the warehouse, where they will be packed and ready for shipment. Even for an experienced employee who is familiar with each item’s location, the process of sifting through the products to find the right one can be time-consuming and tedious. However, if you use RFID tags on your items, they will communicate with an electronic reader, which will detect and read every item inside each box or cart almost instantly.
Radio Frequency Identification tags, or RFID for short, are intelligent barcodes that can communicate with a networked system to track any product, whether it’s on a shelf in your warehouse or in a shopping cart at a retail store.
While previously used to track cattle, this technology is now gaining popularity among manufacturers who want to track the location of each product they make, from the moment it is manufactured until it is pulled off the shelf and sold. This enables them to analyze their product movement in order to better tailor their production and distribution operations, cut costs, and handle returns, all based on the market flow of their current products.
RFID tags can also be used on items in a warehouse. Depending on the type and quality of the tag, an item picker can locate and read items from up to 100 meters away. This saves a significant amount of time compared to the traditional method of sorting through the lots to find the correct lot containing the required item. In addition to increasing the item detection range over traditional tagging systems, RFID tags can store more information, such as secondary product codes; the read-write nature of RFIDs allows the data to be modified or overwritten if necessary. This comes in handy when reallocating product SKUs or renaming specific items.
Understanding the benefits of using a flow-compatible WMS
While spreadsheets can be useful for managing storerooms, it is critical to have a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that is compatible with your business practices in order to catalogue your items and track stock movement. For example, if you are a drop shipper with a virtual inventory, your WMS should allow you to mark customer sales orders as drop shipments and track vendor fulfilments.
These systems not only capture data about your items and transactions, but they can also generate reports on various focal points as needed. For example, by specifying a time frame, you can generate inventory summary and valuation reports that show item quantities at different stages of their life cycles as well as asset values. This enables you to determine your inventory turnover rate, reduce the number of slow-moving items in your possession, and free up space and capital for fast-moving items.
Furthermore, these systems can be integrated with your accounting platform or shipping service provider, allowing you to reduce the time spent fixing duplicate transactions and correcting data entry errors.
While a traditional WMS allows you to record SKUs, monitor item statuses, and track stock flow, it is limited to one physical location and requires more manual intervention, such as accessing reports by hand and sending them to sales teams, installing upgrades, and so on.
This concludes the ways you can optimise your warehouse for a hassle-free experience. To summarise, you will want to:
To optimise your warehouse, consider identifying the type and nature of your items, arranging them based on frequency of orders, using locator systems to speed up pick and pack times, and investing in a warehouse management system that fits your workflow.
