The folks at the Material Handling Institute of America have thrown all of last year’s ProMat sessions in Podcast/Webcast form onto their website, for free. This presentation is intriguing – who doesn’t want to save a hundred grand? It’s presented by Louis J. Cerny, Vice President of Sedlak, and lasts about 37 minutes; it’s easy to listen to in the background if you don’t feel the need to watch the slide presentation.

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Push back rack systems are excellent high density storage solutions — perhaps the most economical way to squeeze space out of a crowded warehouse.  All loads are stored and retrieved from the same aisle. This reduces the number of aisles needed in a facility, freeing up more space for storage. Aisles can take a great deal of space up in a typical warehouse, so by implementing a pushback pallet rack system, you essentially swap selectivity for space. Push back rack systems provide a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) inventory rotation, so you have to be certain your load fits. If it does, congratulations — you’ve just saved a lot of space. But there are issues that can arise when pushback rack is inappropriately specified or utilized. Here are some of those…

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With the advent of widespread e-commerce fulfillment, just-in-time principles, lean management, supply chain collaboration, globalization, the need for ever-faster response, and constant pressure to reduce expenses through headcount and shift reductions, today’s warehouse manager is being asked to do more than ever before.

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Operations & Fulfillment (an excellent publication you should be reading if you aren’t already) has published a list of the top locations for warehouses and DC’s in 2009, in this article “Where to Warehouse: The Top 10 for 2009.”

The winner this year was Henderson, Kentucky, assuming a single warehouse. Dallas, Texas finished among the best locations in a 5-warehouse network.

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Here’s a figure you can relate to: labor is typically about 65% of the operating costs of the average warehouse according to this article in the May 2008 issue of Inbound Logistics. On top of that, 20% of your warehouse workers describe themselves as “disengaged” from the process. Sobering enough to think about, if your business depends on storing, stocking, shipping and receiving to please customers.

The first thing I think of when I see those kinds of numbers is that the cost of labor in a warehouse isn’t something that must stay at 65%. Sure, we all understand that the cost of people in any operation will be at or near the top of your cost lists. Warehouses aren’t special in that regard. The problem is one of productivity per worker. Due to computerization, offices have seen excellent per-employee productivity gains the last twenty years. Some of that has translated to the warehouse or plant floor, but certainly the revolution that has swept the office hasn’t translated entirely to, say, a picking and shipping department. WMS has come for some, sortation systems for others, and those things have made a difference in companies like Robroy who have deployed them correctly.

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