Whenever you are in an industry segment that delivers physical products to your clients, then your main concern should be that all shipments are going to be delivered in time to satisfy their needs and provide a good experience.
Going back to the warehouse scenario, it has been proven that its efficiency is directly correlated to your customer retention. Clients will tend to stick to the same supplier if they can deliver their products faster and reliably. Also, an inefficient warehouse operation will certainly have longer wait times and wasted labour resources that will be reflected in your financials.
Let’s see a few things companies do to improve their warehouse efficiency and save extra costs, while also providing a positive customer experience.
Adopting optimized storage and lean inventory policy is great, especially if you don’t have the option to expand your current warehouse or purchase additional locations. It’s always good to see what you can do to optimize the space you already own.
For example, having redesigned aisles that are closer to each other and generating more storage space upwards will help to minimize travel time for your employees and single lanes will minimize equipment collisions.
As many manufacturers do, having a lean inventory is good for using your space to store only the exact amount that is currently needed by your customers, and will help you focus on having your supplies delivered faster and in smaller amounts, which are easier to manage and move around.
Optimizing your workers’ efficiency and incentivizing their pay is also a good tip to follow. After all, workers will always be more productive whenever their job is made simpler and with a higher economic reward behind it.
Efficiency can be optimized by doing simple things such as storing items that sell together close to each other will help reduce delays and improve the operation. Creating a good incentive pay program will lead to a good improvement in labour productivity from your team. Certainly, you should only be rewarding that extra effort, not something that people already expected to do or can be improved through other measures.
Managing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are very important to determine strategies to mitigate errors and improve the operation of any business. Through these indicators, you can tell what all the critical productivity and other specific costs are, like costs per each package or individual shipped others, for example. This approach should be given a high level of attention whether you are dealing with a small family warehouse business or a multinational conglomerate operation.
Providing clear and direct feedback to your workers using the KPIs will result in higher productivity, as you will be having both individual employee and unit performance stats to share when writing the periodical feedback report to everyone.