Simple solutions for lean Warehousing

An increasingly integrated global economy market with production facilities scattered around the globe, warehouse operations are becoming the critical factor to cope with demand variations. Since inventory management is a critical component of a company’s financial performance, warehousing has become a vital cog by virtue of its potential for improving lead time and cost reductions

While Warehousing is meant for the storage of goods,its operations have evolved over a period of time to deliver high level of efficiency and effectiveness in the inventory management, meeting the needs of the customers and reducing the costs. One of the important parameters that define the efficiency of the warehousing is Turnaround time. A lean management of warehousing starts well before defining its operations. Turnaround time is defined as the time taken by the transport vehicles to complete the whole process of loading finished goods, starting from point of entry to its exit from the factory premises. Turnaround time is probably the most important key performance indicator in any logistics operation. A short turnaround time is economically advantageous, making the most efficient use of time and materials.

Warehouse layout is designed to ensure the efficient flow of products in and out of the facility, optimizing the building’s layout, making sure orders are fulfilled.

The biggest challenge on today’s warehouse design is to increase productivity and accuracy and reduce cost which ultimately means, optimized goods rotation, less frozen capital and efficient use of all the resources assigned.

Following lean management principles can ensure the company has the right visibility of the value-adding activities carried out at the warehouse in order to gain a competitive edge. Generally, warehouse operations picking activities generate more than 55% of the costs.Unnecessary internal transport that results in added cost and lower productivity such as storing fast moving inventory in the back of the warehouse.

Designing and implementing Lean warehouse operations can have a great impact on the total supply chain output. By approaching the waste focus areas mentioned above with Lean solutions, some of the opportunities that come up to reduce lead times in warehousing include- handling time reduction in order picking, put away, palletizing and shipping.

In a warehouse, turnaround time required for stuffing / carting is of paramount importance. Hence to efficiently utilize the time there have to be methods which help the clients to reduce turnaround time.

There are various solutions for this situation. The warehouse can be planned such that there are platforms at the 1st floor / upper floors such that the Reach staker can keep the containers at upper floor and the work can be smoothly carried out without using hoist which consumes electricity and time. This will be similar operation which one performs for ground floor operations.

We as a structural consultants work on designing the layout to make sure that the cost of material movement is minimized.We have developed various methods internally to ensure that our customers benefit out of our expertise.