21 Cheap Tricks for Increased Warehouse Productivity

Need more productivity in your DC or warehouse? Here's how to get it without breaking the bank.

By Maida Napolitano -- Logistics Management, 6/1/2006

General Management

1. Think strategically. Adopt a proactive approach instead of simply reacting to problems that most likely result from poor planning. Think less about purchasing new equipment and more about changing the way you run your warehouse. (As noted later in this article, there are times when a change in equipment is the right way to go.)
2. Recognize that there's always room for improvement. Gather feedback from the rank-and-file, and ask them for suggestions on ways to improve your operation. Schedule regular meetings with key personnel to discuss performance.
3. Keep workers happy and healthy. Happy, healthy employees who are satisfied in their jobs are most productive. Boost employee morale, set realistic metrics, and offer incentives for excellent performance. To make their jobs less physically taxing, create ergonomically efficient work areas, especially for picking and packing. Place fast movers in easy-to-pick areas, keep packing materials within easy reach, and make sure workstations are at the proper height.
4. Observe day-to-day operations. Walk around your warehouse and watch what workers do each day and how they do it. This may reveal some productivity-busting practices. A more formal audit usually will uncover the factors that are inhibiting efficiency.
5. Cross dock. Cross docking is the epitome of warehousing efficiency because it flows product through the warehouse and moves outbound orders directly into waiting trailers instead of storing it. Basic cross docking can be achieved by identifying and anticipating the receipt of products that have predictable sales patterns, so they can be immediately processed for shipment when they arrive at the dock doors. Consider transferring slow movers to satellite facilities where they can be cross-docked only when needed.
6. Dump unnecessary inventory. "Get rid of excess and obsolete inventory," counsels Jack Kuchta, a senior partner with Gross & Associates (G&A) warehousing consultants in Woodbridge, N.J. Sell out-of-date products at discount prices to your customers, or dispose of them through resellers or online auctions. Eliminating unwanted inventory will allow you to focus existing labor and equipment resources on the products that dosell, he says.
7. Get your suppliers to do the work for you. If your relationship with your suppliers allows it, you could, for instance, make them responsible for packing product in the quantities required for each store, labeling the orders with the destination store's address, and delivering them to your warehouse. You would just have to sort items by store and load them onto the proper trucks. Be sure to verify that bar codes and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are properly applied and that they correctly identify the products and their destinations.
8. Get the most from existing information technology. Warehouse management systems (WMS), radio frequency (RF) technology, and bar coding have become mainstays in many warehouses, but not everyone takes the time to reap the full benefits of their diverse capabilities. One often-missed opportunity: Use your WMS and RF for task interleaving. Direct a forklift driver to put a pallet away, then retrieve a nearby pallet to replenish a pick location. That way the driver never leaves the storage area empty-handed. You can also use your WMS and RF to keep congestion in pick aisles at bay by spreading out the directed picks or by batch picking.

Putaway and Storage

9. Double up. Move two pallets at a time by using double pallet jacks. Speed up putaway by double-stacking two pallets of the same stock-keeping unit (SKU). Before trying this technique, verify that the increased loads are within the capacity of your handling and storage equipment.
10. Create drop-off/pick-up stations at the ends of very narrow aisles. Keep less agile turret trucks confined primarily to putaway and retrieval within very narrow storage aisles. You can use less expensive, more versatile counterbalanced and reach forklift trucks to deliver and retrieve pallet loads at wide-aisle stations located at the ends of very narrow aisles.

Retrieval/Order Picking

11. Use case flow racks and pallet flow tracks for quick picking and easy replenishment. Replace decked case and pallet positions with case flow racks and pallet flow tracks. Case flow racks are inclined shelves that span the depth of a back-to-back pallet-rack structure. Product is replenished at the raised end. Pickers don't have to reach for product; gravity causes filled cartons or totes to flow through the shelving on rollers and automatically indexes them to the pick facing for quick retrieval (see Figure 2). Similarly, pallet flow tracks will index pallets to the front of a pick facing. Pallet flow tracks consist of two columns of roller conveyors of various depths, which use gravity to flow pallets from the raised replenishment end to a lower picking end.
12. Create a dynamic pick tunnel. Use push back racks for reserved storage above pallet-flow tracks. In push back racks, pallets are placed on nesting trolleys. A new pallet inserted into the lane pushes the front pallet to the back. When a pallet is removed, the back pallet automatically indexes forward to the front of the lane. Handling is faster than for other deep-storage modules because the lift truck stays in the aisle.
13. Slot in the right place at the right size. Keep popular items in prime pick positions. At the same time, make sure that slow movers aren't populating the middle of the pick line, a practice that lengthens travel paths. Ensure that the correctly sized pick module is being used for each product. Are you replenishing a case flow rack position five times daily? If so, then maybe you should pick the item from a pallet flow rack instead.
14. Study your order profiles. What percentage of your orders are one-line orders? What percentage of those one-line orders are for the same product? Instead of having an order picker travel to one pick position a dozen times, pre-sort pick tickets for single-line, same-SKU orders at the start of a shift so pickers can travel to that position once.
15. Batch pick with low-cost equipment. If you keep slow movers in an out-of-the-way mezzanine, try batch-picking them to stackable totes on carts. Place the totes on a pallet that can be lowered to ground level by a lift truck. For a truly low-cost approach to picking very small items, suggests Geoff Sisko, a senior partner with G&A, have pickers wear aprons with multiple pockets and pick each order into a specific pocket.
16. Pick slow movers directly from storage. Use order-picker trucks to batch pick slow movers directly from reserved storage. This is more efficient than moving those items to forward pick positions, where all they do is lengthen the pick path.

Receiving, Packing, and Shipping

17. Use non-powered conveyors for unloading trailers. Inbound shipments that arrive in trailers with cartons randomly stacked from floor to ceiling create inefficiencies on the receiving dock. At one clothing importer's warehouse, for example, it routinely took three people four hours to find like products within the trailer and then sort, count, and palletize them. Add an inexpensive, non-powered conveyor that can extend from the dock into a trailer, so one person inside the trailer can quickly move cartons out onto the dock, where workers can sort cartons onto pallets in much less time.
18. Enforce the use of bar codes. Require suppliers to apply bar codes to the handling unit, usually a master carton. If all else fails, recommends Don Derewecki, a senior partner at G&A, send suppliers pre-printed, bar-coded labels for each SKU with specific instructions for applying them. Attach bar-coded "license plates" to pallets and assign each one to a spot in the palletizing area. Workers scan cartons with RF devices, which tell them on which pallet to place the cartons.
19. Schedule dock traffic. Dock congestion can bog down an entire operation. Schedule receipts and pick-ups in a way that will balance your warehouse workload. Many companies, especially those without separate shipping and receiving docks, schedule shipping and receiving for different shifts.
20. Eliminate checking. With RF, workers can scan/confirm each item when it is picked. If some kind of check is still required, consider a check-weigh system, some of which cost less than $20,000. These systems compare picked weights with expected order weights, and then alert users when there's a discrepancy. Accurate, up-to-date product information will always be required.
21. Pick directly to shipping cartons. If orders can be scanned/confirmed at picking, then it makes sense to pick directly into shipping cartons. Packers just need to add packing material, tape, and label the shipping carton. Make sure the right-sized cartons are close at hand. Nothing slows down progress like stopping to find a larger carton and transferring items part-way through an order because the first carton was too small.

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