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 in Automating Your Warehouse Operations

If you are looking at little automation in your warehouse this is the best practice to lookout. If you are automating your warehouse in terms of conveyors or sorters or even robots it would make a lot of sense to mark your SKUs as conveyable or not conveyable, sortable or non-sortable and as the robots coming everywhere robotable or non-robotable. The last thing you want to do is make a small product or a big…

The Zone Picking Best Practice to Improve Order Picking Productivity

This next best practice is about the warehouse zone picking process. The way this works is if your picking involves going to multiple areas, multiple isles of bin locations, and you are picking from different bin locations. This process is about eliminating all the unnecessary walking, and of course we all know the more you pick, the more you can ship, the more you ship, the more you invoice, the more you can get paid….

The Warehouse Yard Management Best Practices to Increase Visibility

This is a best practice that will be very useful if you have a lot of trucks, trailers and containers coming into your facility. This is called yard management, so basically this is a small system within the WMS with which you can track your truck’s trailers and containers. You can create yard locations and of course you can create dock doors and you can track them exactly. But it’s all about visibility right, I…

The Warehouse Voice Picking Best Practice to Improve Efficiency

This best practice is on warehouse voice picking. Instead of looking at the screen and looking at the device and typing in the characters and picking you would talk hands-free and eyes-free with voice-picking. This is what the voice picking is, but let’s take a step back and understand how this whole picking process is evolved. If you look at it, the very first picking process was all based on the paper pick takers. There…

The Best Practices to Implement Vendor Compliance in Your Warehouse

This next best practice that you can implement in your distribution center is something called vendor performance. So vendor performance is basically you as a retailer or a distributor or as an ecommerce order fulfiller you are buying your product from different vendors.  When the vendor ship to your DC, you can rate them on how well they are doing in terms of compliance. Compliance requirements are mandatory in all of the big ecom warehouses….

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…