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Ideas to Help Optimize Your Warehouse Productivity

Warehouse manager can utilize Nutting industrial carts and trailers to increase output and efficiency.

Ideas to Help Optimize Your Warehouse Productivity

Discover ideas to help streamline your warehouse operations. Improve warehouse efficiency through your WMS, warehouse layout, proper equipment, or automation.

Whether you’re doing warehousing for your own business or running a full-scale distribution center, the bottom line at any scale for an eCommerce fulfillment center is to make sure your link in the supply chain is holding up to the strain of customer demand. Maybe you’ve been pouring over this year’s metrics or are trying to ramp up productivity for a new product line. If so, you may have been wondering what changes you can make to your warehouse operations to make things run a little more smoothly. Here are a few suggestions to get the ball rolling.

Improving Warehouse Efficiency

When looking to make your warehouse more efficient, the first place to make adjustments is with your Warehouse Management System (WMS). A WMS, or an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with a WMS module, handles your warehouse’s inventory management, allowing pickers to send and receive crucial information in real time through interconnected SKU or barcode scanners. Not only does this help reduce shortages due to poor inventory accuracy, but it also allows you to automate data collection of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for future analysis.

Fulfillment

When looking at fulfillment as a KPI, you’re looking at metrics like order fill rate, order fulfillment timeliness, and picks per hour. Knowing how many orders are completed, how quickly you’re able to fulfill them, and how much time your team spends filling an order will help you identify fufillment related choke points.

Nutting Trailers can be linked together to create a tugger trailer train.
Increasing output is easy with a tugger trailer train and Nutting custom roller deck trailers.

Inventory Accuracy

Knowing what you have in your warehouse at any given moment is crucial. While it is common for a distribution center to have a disparity between what is actually on the shelves and what is recorded in the management system, it is important to implement systems that keep that disparity from getting out of hand. Allowing the difference to become too great, will result in spoilage, overstocking, or accepting orders for items that are not actually available. Regular audits of your stock against your database are highly advised. By identifying items that are regularly overstocked or understocked, you will be able to track down specific problems that are leading to unnecessary costs.

Replenishment

Replenishment is measured by how well your inventory moves from reserve storage to active picking bins. Understanding your replenishment metrics will allow you to make better, more efficient decisions about what inventory to replace and when to replace it. For example, If space is limited, you can  improve efficiency by prioritizing stock with a higher replenishment profit.

Order Accuracy

Increasing the order accuracy of your warehouse to nearly 100% is an important benchmark to reach. After all, ensuring the customer receives what they ordered is the baseline target for any fulfillment center.

Dead Stock

Dead stock is an often overlooked efficiency killer.  If you streamline your warehouse operations but fail to purge products that have become damaged or otherwise unsellable, also known as dead stock, your facility is paying to store items that will never provide revenue. Therefore, keeping track of dead inventory and finding low cost methods of moving it, is a must. Ikea uses one of our favorite creative ways of moving dead stock, they have created a yard sale space where customers can purchase individual parts of broken items for do-it-yourself type projects. Before paying a trash removal company to dispose of dead stock, consider ways to create incentives for customers or community members to help you reduce costs.

Warehouse Layout

The way your available space is laid out can significantly affect order-picking productivity. This will vary depending on the type of warehouse you’re operating, but in all cases, minimizing your pickers’ travel time with a good slotting strategy will have a positive outcome for order fulfillment and workflow. Additionally, equipment such as ergonomic order-picking carts and picker platforms that attach to forklifts help maximize the amount of product gathered in a single trip and the potential of vertical space. Pallet carts that train together can also be an effective way of moving multiple orders at once.

If your warehouse includes a manufacturing or assembly component, ensuring that workstations are organized and close to the storage space of necessary materials can save your workers time during set up and put away.

Is Automation a Necessity?

Warehouse technology continues to grow and improve. It used to be that pallet racks and forklifts were the only option available for material handling. However, automation has advanced the picking process with robotic warehouse workers and conveyors, minimizing downtime and creating cost savings for the right warehouse operation. With that being said, the initial investment and the restrictions required by the automated pickers can make the pricing of these advancements prohibitive.

Before investing in technological process improvements like automation, it’s a good idea to consider some alternative ways you could improve the efficiency of your warehouse with add-ons for the equipment you already have. If automation is the route your business needs to go, Nutting Carts and Trailers can manufacture custom carts, trailers, or stands to operate with your autonomous platform of choice.

A Custom Nutting Platform used with Fetch Robotics CartConnect500
Nutting Carts and Trailers can manufacture a custom solution for your autonomous needs.

Making the Right Choice For Your Warehouse

Let the experts at Nutting help you decide what warehousing equipment is right for you! Choosing the right trailer for your warehouse space can be a daunting task. However, by considering the needs of your unique warehouse, you can make the decision easier.

Nutting offers several solutions, like our Caster steer trailers. These trailers can be fitted with a variety of customizations, such as lift gates and shelving, to make them even more wellsuited to your operation. Whatever your needs, the Nutting sales and engineering team can help you customize a trailer or cart to fit your facility.

The way your available space is laid out can significantly affect order-picking productivity. This will vary depending on the type of warehouse you’re operating, but in all cases, minimizing your pickers’ travel time with a good slotting strategy will have a positive outcome for order fulfillment and workflow. Additionally, equipment such as ergonomic order-picking carts and picker platforms that attach to forklifts help maximize the amount of product gathered in a single trip and the potential of vertical space. Pallet carts that train together can also be an effective way of moving multiple orders at once.

If your warehouse includes a manufacturing or assembly component, ensuring that workstations are organized and close to the storage space of necessary materials can save your workers time during set up and put away.

Is Automation a Necessity?

Warehouse technology continues to grow and improve. It used to be that pallet racks and forklifts were the only option available for material handling. However, automation has advanced the picking process with robotic warehouse workers and conveyors, minimizing downtime and creating cost savings for the right warehouse operation. However, the initial investment and the restrictions required by the automated pickers can make the pricing of these advancements prohibitive.

Before investing in technological process improvements like automation, it’s a good idea to consider some alternative ways you could improve the efficiency of your warehouse with add-ons for the equipment you already have.

Making the Right Choice For Your Warehouse

Let the experts at Nutting help you decide what warehousing equipment is right for you! Choosing the right trailer for your warehouse space can be a daunting task. However, by considering the needs of your unique warehouse, you can make the decision easier.

Nutting offers several solutions, like our Caster steer trailers. These trailers can be fitted with a variety of customizations, such as lift gates and shelving, to make them even more wellsuited to your operation. Whatever your needs, the Nutting sales and engineering team can help you customize a trailer or cart to fit your facility.

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