In an age of high customer expectations, warehouse management inefficiency will cost your business. An inefficient warehouse slows down your customer fulfilment, which in turn affects customer loyalty. It increases your operational costs, which if passed on to your prices, will reduce your competitiveness.
Inefficiency places a cap on the amount of business you can handle. This wastes marketing and sales efforts aimed at increasing orders. There is little point in expanding business if you can’t deliver because your warehouse is already operating at its maximum capacity.
3 Manual Warehouse Processes That May Be Holding You Back
Redundant Checking
Mistakes will happen in all manual processes. This makes checking a necessity. If you do your checking manually, then redundant checks are necessary to ensure against mistakes in the check itself. For example, a picker counts off items taken from a bin. The packer then repeats this counting on the same items, and so forth. This manual counting slows down everyone’s productivity. On the other hand, bar codes and scanners tied into a centralised warehouse management software does this counting instead, thereby eliminating redundant manual checks.
Inefficient Picking
An organised warehouse layout goes a long way toward optimising your picking operations. Placing high turnover items in convenient locations, and locating items commonly ordered together in close proximity, are two examples of an efficient layout. However, you can’t organise your warehouse to efficiently handle all customer orders. The picker who must search through a warehouse, or stops to ask the whereabouts of items, is not doing her job efficiently. However, the picker who interacts with warehouse management software via a pick-to-voice technology never has this problem. The software can direct the picker along an optimised pick path.
Picking the Wrong Products
Coping with a return because the customer received the wrong product is an inefficiency because it ties up labour. This problem frequently occurs with look-alike products. Pickers can pick the wrong product or a product can be placed in the wrong bin. The picker who scans bar code into warehouse management software does not make this mistake with look-alike products. The software only allows the picker to select items based on their barcode rather than their visual appearance.
If you rely on manual practices and wish to increase your warehouse management efficiency, contact us to learn more about how our software can help.
