Warehouse Improvements with a BIG Impact

There’s no shortage of blogs and advice out there on improving your warehouse and distributions efficiency and productivity. It’s easy to see why. For anyone who runs a warehouse/distribution operation or oversees operations management, those two factors are their job or the profit and loss of the business.

The more efficient and organised a warehouse is, the more productive it is, and the more it can get done in the working day. Business moves faster, revenues are higher, costs are spread across more profitable activity and everyone is happy, including the customer.

Considering how important a topic this is, we thought our own warehouse productivity ideas should be both focused and actionable. It is, after all, what we help businesses do and we’ve picked up more and more ways of doing just that over the years of experience we have.

It’s all very well making blanket statements that will improve things like ‘make use of all of the available space’ and ‘implement KPIs’ and “train staff”, but they’re not practical actions that can make a difference immediately.

To do just that we also think it’s useful when looking at how your warehouse runs to break it down into a series of contributing factors. You’ll see below that that means you end up addressing broad elements, such as your warehouse staff, with specific actions.

Warehouse incentive program

When it comes to running a warehouse operation efficiently your staff are clearly going to be one of the key factors to consider. If you do not currently incentivise your warehouse staff based on performance (which can be established as business KPIs – inline with the company objectives) then this is one of the easiest changes to implement.

The downside is of course that it will increase your operating costs (however tax deductible). Having said that, the whole purpose of an incentive program is to make the business more money by improving performance, which in turn theoretically means that you can afford to pay your staff more.

There are multiple ways to incentivise – but whatever you settle on, try to make it visual (certificates – KPI charts – Organisation congratulations email) If it’s monthly then perhaps a chart in the warehouse office with a target line and an actual line would work; you want to give a constant reminder of how your workforce can get to the reward at the end.

It is also normally a good idea to highlight at inception that the target will be reviewed regularly. If your workforce are constantly exceeding what you set (which is common when incentive schemes are introduced) then you’re going to want to up that figure.

Regular warehouse feedback mechanism

Your warehouse workforce are likely to be the first people to spot any problems that are impacting efficiency and productivity within the warehouse environment. Whether they escalate the problem or not depends on how connected they feel to the warehouse and operations management functions.

If there is no or it’s a complicated difficult process in place for sharing feedback then it’s less likely that you’ll ever hear about whatever it is that’s holding them back.

Sometimes all this needs is the warehouse team leader/manager to foster team communication so that he/she hears about the broken shelf in aisle 12 that means it takes twice as long to load stock.

Other times you’ll need something more formal like a weekly sit-down or an ideas box-style solution. Whatever the system you put in place you will need direct feedback from the warehouse floor to understand how to improve your warehouse efficiency.

Traditional staff tool box meetings are a great place to start, review warehouse safety, write up the KPI charts, Q & A time and a group discussion around any continuous improvement projects (why we missed a KPI target on a specific day), a review on how the business is tracking can also be discussed probably more monthly than daily.

Remember in a group meeting environment not all warehouse staff are comfortable in talking in a group setting, be sure to also have a backup plan (a suggestion box)

Warehouse Operators Training

The general step on this topic to improve things is to ‘make sure your warehouse staff are trained’. What can work well here is to put in place structure and to make sure that training feels like something that is valued and worthwhile. Consider putting in place a formal certifications structure. Warehouse workers could receive certifications for things like “computer usage, ‘Picking route understanding’ and more.

Certifications can expire, so your warehouse staff have to renew their training every 24 months. They can also be mandatory or optional and come with rewards. Mandatory certifications allow workers to work in your warehouse whilst perhaps optional ones increase the end of year bonus depending on how many are held.

A more involved process might see you developing a warehouse specific module based learning, where staff work through modules (ie inwards goods, despatch, cycle counting), each module should be detailed enough for the staff to be competent in completing each task within the specific warehouse department. It may mean documenting step by step each task for the staff to learn then be signed off as competent once completed.

This process is a lot of admin at the start but a great way to get all the staff upskilled and can be used at any pay review.

Consistently add ‘little extras’

There is a soft skills element to improving efficiency and productivity. A happy workforce truly is a more productive workforce and whilst you may have created a fantastic static environment, sometimes it is the little added extras that really make warehouse work a pleasure and foster that sense of team.

Takeout pizzas or shared meal for lunch paid for by the company on odd Fridays, an early finish every so often, revealing that everyone can take an extra day off in December for a Christmas shopping day at the start of the month or replacing the old warehouse radio with a new sound system. It does not need to be big things, but they do need to be seen as a positive for the workforce. Add them in every so often and watch morale and performance improve.

Review your warehouse picking routes

It’s a fairly common thing, particularly amongst warehousing businesses who only rarely sell new product lines, that picking routes are set – either by computer or manually – and then never looked at again.

This could be because you have the most efficient picking routes in the world but, more likely, it’s because that’s just how the system operates.

Anything that becomes too static is dangerous. It means picking routes fall into the ‘unknown, unknown’ category of process; you’ll never know if they could be better because you’ve never known anything different, keep doing the same thing, you will keep getting the same result….

You should schedule a review of picking routes regularly, led by warehouse management, with operations involved as well. The point of the review is to test alternative routes and see if the outcomes are expected to be better.

A simple trick to measure your picking route efficiency is first to measure, steps taken/time taken to complete an order, almost a time in motion study of the warehouse pickers.