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 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 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 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 Warehouse Rate Shopping Best Practice to Reduce Shipping Charges

This best practice we are going to discuss is called as rate shopping. The rate shopping can be done for both parcel and the (Less than Load) LTL. I mean the parcels are the small boxes that they ship mostly as Ecom orders. Sometimes they also ship retail orders as parcels from the distribution center to the final destination. In Ecom orders it will be a consumer that’s buying product, they place an order on…

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 Best Practices in Designing UI/UX of the Warehouse Management App

This best practice is about the importance of UI (User Interface) in improving the distribution center productivity. In this day and age where Apple and Android have completely changed the user experience that is so easy to understand and use the app. Particularly in the distribution center the time is spent significantly on training the end users. I’ve seen many distribution centers that are literally revolving doors, where personnel come and go. All these personnel…

6 Best Practices for Order Picking in Distribution

Getting products into hands of the customer quickly and efficiently is quickly moving from a differentiation to table stakes. As expectation of buyers increase, distribution centers must look for new ways to get things done correctly and efficiently. Consider these realities: Often, the picking process is the most time-consuming process off all, making it a potential bottleneck. More orders picked translate to more orders shipped. That leads to quicker invoicing and increased revenues. Picking also directly…