Warehouse capacity monitoring

Over the years, I had the chance to contribute to many warehouses improvements projects and one of the most important issue was to be able to better manage capacity. This subject touches many aspects: first to be able to understand the overall capacity (generally in pallet positions) but also in picking facing utilisation and capacity, reserve capacity, per section and per dedicated zones capacity. I saw everyday, managers searching for space, trying to better understand what will be coming at receiving today, tomorrow and the weeks to come. This is in parallel to sales and marketing promotion initiatives (of course with pressure on capacity), new products launch (additional facing), suppliers limitations for continuous production (ie: turkey for Thanksgiving) etc.

Of course, this situation has evolve to provide more information to managers trying to cope with this challenging situation. Few initiatives to consider:

• WMS implementation: Important to note that not all warehouses have gone through WMS implementation and KPI monitoring capability, by far the most important steps to better information;
• Develop significant KPI: Try to step back for few minutes and look at available current information to be able to monitor capacity, look at your business and the mean to collect and a daily basis the capacity by container types (unit, inner pack, cases, pallets etc), by divisions, section, aisles, etc;
• Real time monitoring: Put in place a mean to collect information on a real time basis using scanning an RF communication. This will speed up the information update and the collection and accuracy process;
• Train your team on the importance of KPI: Don’t underestimate the importance to keep your warehouse team trained and informed on the importance to collect, maintain and use information to manage warehouse capacity;

Finally, I recently visit a large DC in the US and saw a very interesting dashboard for manager to see, supported by on line information, all the movements types and pieces count per aisle (using color). The warehouse associate were declaring the movements not using the cube optimization functionality of their WMS solution. It was very visual with interesting information to direct movement to proper aisle with capacity available.

Don’t forget: Good information use by good workers generally create good decision !!