Top 10 Best Practices that You Can Implement in Your Distribution Center Tomorrow with No System Changes and Very Little Process Changes

Implementing best practices in your warehouse is the key in increasing the throughput and productivity. They are listed below. 1. Assign Ownership of Aisles to Operators So They Keep their Aisles Clean with Pride Managing the operator’s aisle pristine and in an orderly way is necessary to increase the picking in the warehouse. When operators are happy and proud of the work they do – they do even better. To make them proud of the…

The Best Practices to Optimize Slotting Process in Your Warehouse

This next best practice is about optimizing your slotting process. It’s all about picking and especially it’s even more important in the e-commerce world, because you are picking one unit order and two unit orders. This is what the standard order profile is for the orders that people are placing from their computers at home through the web and through the mobile device. It’s all about picking from the active locations and piece pick locations….

The Returns ASN Best Practice to Optimize Reverse Logistics in Your Warehouse.

This best practice is about Returns ASN (Advance Shipment Notice).  We discussed about the ASN before and we articulated on how useful was the ASN in deployment scheduling and your were able to plan your work in the receiving area. You were also able to get upfront information as to what is going to hit your DC and you could even allocate inventory in terms of the location of the product and allocate inventory for…

The 3 Best Practices to Optimize Your Warehouse Inventory Replenishments

This best practice is about making replenishments inside the warehouse. It is important to stay on the top off replenishments always in your warehouse. If you have just one shift that you are running it would help a lot. If you spend extra hours in the evening and then do the topping off all your active locations it will be helpful for the pickers in the next shift. In the next morning when the pickers…

The Significance of Labor Cost per Unit in your Supply Chain

During one of my implementations, I was talking to this DC Director, this was a lady that had this amazing knack to formulate processes completely on the fly, that worked for their complicated manufacturing and distribution center, that was handling a lot of these eye glass prescriptions. The challenge with this operation was that their product was very small and also very fragile, which means it is pretty much a norm to break a lens…

The DC Quality Control Best Practices to Improve Shipping Efficiency

This is a best practice that you can refer to if you have a lot of quality issues in your distribution center. Let us assume that for some reason you opened up the box from reserve. You thought that everything was okay at the time of receiving. Then you put it away in reserve and for replenishment you moved the product from reserve to active location. After opening up the box you find that there…

The Sequencing Best Practice to Boost Warehouse Order Picking Efficiency

This best practice is known as location sequencing. It means that when you are configuring your locations for picking purposes, replenishment, and for put-away purposes in the reserve area in the top level position. While doing this you would have picked the naming convention to streamline the picking. On top of it there is also the ability to configure something called as the location sequencing. It means that you do not want your pickers to…

Case in Point: Real Insights from an IoT Pilot in a Distribution Center

It’s one thing to rave about the benefits that IoT will deliver to a distribution center, but it’s another to get a look at how it really adds value and provides actionable insights. Let’s take a look at one experience I had recently. Recently, I was at a prospect site for a pilot demonstrating our technology. Typically, we show up at the client site Monday morning and get things up and running in an hour….

The Power of Music in Supply Chain

Conventional wisdom dictates that a picture is worth a thousand words and stories are worth a thousand pictures. I believe that…and I use stories in my presentation regularly. Of course, picking the right story is critical to making the biggest impact. Sometimes, though, I have an audience that speaks a completely different language. How do you communicate to inspire then? I think the answer is music. My daughter has been singing since she was five,…

Simulation Tools Optimize Processes & Take Surprises Out of WMS Deployments

I learned a few things when I spent one winter in a distribution center in Canada.  I learned what it was like to arrive for work in the dark and leave in the dark. I learned about the extra connector in Canadian cars that would allow the car to be plugged in to heat the engine block so the car would still start in sub-zero weather. I learned about how these winter warriors would get…