Cant find quality, experienced warehouse staff? Are you sure you need them?

Its well-publicised all industries are struggling finding staff to fulfil a variety of roles across the country.

In the warehouse environment its thinking outside the box, questioning whether your business needs 10 – 12 - 15 warehouse operators or whether working smarter not harder the warehouse operation could/would/should operate with only 8 staff and still have the same warehouse through put.

Operating simply by “custom and practice” sure, the warehouse has always had a head count of 10 and it works fine, and its been budgeted for. But where did the FTE of 10 come from?

As a business grows, generally staffing numbers also grow, new roles established, higher throughput through the warehouse is required with additional volumes, great, but has anybody reviewed the operation and tasks in an entirety.

Are the tasks being completed in the most efficient way?, can one task be merged into another task?, and does the task even add value to the operation?

Sure, easy to say in a blog, but ive worked with a couple of largish pick and pack warehouses where throughput was essential, large order volumes and busy operations.

Both of these warehouse pick and pack operations had one thing in common, the warehouse order pickers - picked customer orders into plastic “fish bins” on trolleys, once the order was completed they handed the “fish bins” over to a second warehouse team who unpack the fish bins at a packing station and re-packed the order into cardboard shipping cartons?

Why not just pick the order straight into shipping cartons?

The solution is obvious now but one of these business’s had five warehouse staff for years – unpacking and re-packing customer orders. This is an example of non-value adding labour at almost a thousand dollars a day!!

In this day and age with labour tight and good staff hard to find, Its work task reviews like this that need to be undertaken to understand have we got this operation running as efficient as it should/could be.

Need some help with your warehouse operations efficiency drop us a line.