Scott Stone | Warehousing Insights | Material Handling Systems - Part 39
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How to Benchmark Your Warehouse

March 26, 2012
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warehousing operation

Comparison is natural – and necessary

Everyone likes to see how they’re doing vs. their industry peers.  This isn’t just a natural urge to compare yourself, it’s a vital part of doing business.

Benchmarking, at the heart of it, is comparing your performance to others like you. You look at your business processes and outcomes, and how they stack up to the performance metrics of industry leaders, your peers, and the best from similar operations. In warehousing, it is particularly important to understand where you are, and where you could be with reconfigurations, tweaks, and innovations that others are using to improve their numbers.  What do you specifically measure? Typically this can include quality, cost, and time. Specifically, it can get much more complex.

At the end it helps you understand the success of your peers and how you can reproduce that success.

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

How to Make Warehouse & Plant Visitors Safer: A Guide

February 29, 2012
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warehouse visitors or guests
In a fast-paced distribution center, there is plenty of forklift traffic, moving conveyors, packing machines, carousels, and dock doors. Same with manufacturing; you have all kinds of production machinery, welding (human and robotic), and heavy material being handled, stacked, or processed, along with the forklifts and other handling equipment. It’s hard enough to keep your own people – the ones who should know the lay of the land – safe in these environments. But what about visitors who haven’t had the benefit of your safety training and the situational awareness that your employees develop over time?

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Posted in Safety & Ergonomics|

9 Ways to Reduce Product Damage in Your Warehouse

February 16, 2012
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crushed box

In warehouse & manufacturing operations, things get broken. They break in a number of ways, and it’s expensive. You’ve probably seen product broken or damaged in amazing and improbable ways  if you’ve been in this business for any length of time. We had a client once buy a bunch of mismatched, used industrial shelving (not from us), only to see it collapse and dump thousands of tiny aircraft components on the floor. It had to be swept up and discarded since it was all mixed up and visually impossible to sort.

Those are extraordinary examples, but everyday inventory damage that cost “only” a few hundred or thousand dollars can savage your bottom line.

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

To-Do List for Moving a Warehouse

February 7, 2012
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warehouse reconfiguration

Over the past four decades, we’ve seen plenty of operations move. We’ve installed entirely new conveyor systems into functioning operations without disturbing the flow of existing work. We’ve seen companies pick up an entire distribution operation and move it across two hundred feet of parking lot into another building. It’s not new territory for us, and if you have managed a manufacturing or warehousing operation long, it’s probably not for you either.

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

Justifying AisleCop Forklift Safety Gate Systems

January 13, 2012
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AisleCop Safety System

We see two kinds of operations that have utilized AisleCop® forklift safety gate systems. The first are those companies who have defined traffic plans and are looking to prevent possible accidents in high-risk, limited-visibility, or heavy-traffic aisles. They foresee potential accidents and are taking measures to prevent them. The second kind are companies who have had an incident, or a near-miss.

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Posted in Forklift - Pedestrian Safety|

How to Implement the 5S Approach in Workcells & Workstations

January 4, 2012
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workstation with 5S implementation

Based on 5 Japanese words that begin with “S,” the 5S Philosophy homes in on effective work place organization and standardized work procedures. When correctly implemented, it reduces waste and increases efficiency and overall work quality. You’ll also have a safer, more effective operation and employees who are more checked in than they were before. It simplifies work flow and helps you find inefficiency.

You may see things like empty flow racks, needless processes, over stocking, redundant operations, looming maintenance problems and more.

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Posted in Storage, Organization & Workstations|

6 Ideas to Keep Your Warehouse Clean

January 3, 2012
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One easy way to gauge a warehouse or manufacturing plant’s effectiveness is to check how clean it is. Cleaner facilities are more productive, tend to be safer and tend to be more organized.

Whether your facility features gleaming floors or just keeps debris from packaging materials, pallets and accumulated junk under control, being cleaner is well worth the time investment. People who work in a disorganized facility where things just feel sloppy won’t work as well. They may make more errors. They won’t have pride in the operation. An inch of dust on rack beams or beneath conveyor legs sends a message to workers. You don’t need a sparkling facility with floors so clean you could have lunch on them, but a well-lit, organized, pleasant place to work can be helpful in employee attitudes and retention.

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

Robotics and End of the Line Packaging

November 18, 2011
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End of line case packing robot with conveyor

The end of a manufacturing or distribution line is where the rubber meets the road for many operations. It’s potentially the last place where you have direct control of your product before it ships to retailers or direct customers. It’s where you can add a lot of value…or spoil a lot of value. The end of the line in many ways is more important to your company’s image as all its public relations, its websites, its brochures. It is often where your reputation can be made.

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Posted in Automation, Labor & Efficiency|

How the Movies Get Material Handling Wrong

November 15, 2011
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Mateial handling movies

If you are in the warehousing or material handling industry, you’ll find yourself identifying warehouse and handling equipment in movies or television shows quite often. Many of us have seen, for instance, the NFL graphics of a large distribution system used on Fox network for years. I’ve pointed out Hytrol conveyors in movies to my wife for years, to the point where she says it first when she sees it.

For fun, we have put together a list of the more famous scenes in entertainment history involving material handling equipment, and how it could have been done better.

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

Warehouse Productivity: Prove, Improve it

October 11, 2011
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warehouse workers in a rack aisle

In the last two decades, smart companies have identified the warehouse operation as a profit center, not a cost center. This is far from universal, but it inches toward that every day. No longer are warehouse managers considered box-hustlers – at least not in smart companies. Many are utilizing varying levels of automation. WMS is standard for larger operations and is making its way even to single-building, midsize and smaller ones.

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

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