warehouse | Warehousing Insights | Material Handling Systems - Part 8
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Seeing Around Corners: The Danger Spots in Warehouses & Factories

August 28, 2012
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pallet rack row end and forklift traffic

In an industrial environment, intersections can be dangerous. With fast-moving workers who are busy and probably distracted, and fast-moving forklifts that may have loads elevated that can obstruct the driver’s view, corners, ends of rack rows, and intersections can be the cause of many accidents. Whether it’s a worker walking and carrying a load, or a forklift on its way to the next pick, the chances of collisions, injuries, and damages are greater at intersections than most anywhere else. What are your options when it comes to making your intersections safer?

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Posted in Forklift - Pedestrian Safety|

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|

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|

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|

Warehouse & Order Fulfillment: Hiring Good People

July 19, 2011
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distribution center at peak season

Finding qualified candidates for warehouse and production work isn’t easy

This is particularly true with supervisors who understand how kitting, ticketing, and storage operations. You want people who know the work, and who can supervise and motivate your employees. Qualified candidates are often the kind of people who aren’t online perusing jobs. They aren’t going to temp agencies. It’s a unique and difficult situation for warehousing operations. Quite often, they must be bilingual to supervise an increasingly Spanish-speaking workforce. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

Smart Labor Management Helps Cut Warehouse Costs

May 22, 2011
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packing operations

It’s important to control costs in your operation. What are some warehousing cost-cutting methods you can employ that don’t require extensive investment or re-tooling? Most of the costs of warehousing operations fall into the following categories:

  • People
  • Real Estate, Utilities & other Fixed Costs
  • Inventory
  • Technology

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

13 Best Practices for Warehouse Productivity

March 17, 2011
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Improving a warehousing operation is a complex endeavor that can be approached from any number of angles. Here are 13 common actions you can consider in any warehouse improvement effort:

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

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