Managing a warehouse isn’t easy. You must send the right products in the right quantities to your customers as soon as possible. While doing this, you must receive incoming products from suppliers and place them into the proper shelves.
You’re also managing an inventory, which is a demanding job in its own right. You need to keep enough inventory to keep your customers happy, but not so much that you waste space and money on excess inventory.
Staying on top of all of this without making mistakes requires an awareness of how they can happen. Here are three warehouse management mistakes to watch for:
Not Keeping up with Receiving
In the rush to ship products, it’s tempting to postpone putting away the product sent by your suppliers. Letting these inbound shipments build up on the receiving dock merely makes the work much more difficult when you finally decide to deal with it. It also hampers the efforts of managers who work on other shifts. In addition, the inventory shelves these items are meant to replenish are getting ever lower. If you aren’t careful, your pickers will have to pull product directly off the receiving dock. This is inefficient and slows down your customer fulfilment process.
Not Keeping Your Warehouse in Order
When rushing to ship products, it’s easy to let go of housekeeping work such as keeping aisles and docks clear of empty pallets, shrink-wrap, loose strapping, and other debris. These interfere with the efficient movement of people and products within your warehouse. They’re also dangerous trip and fall hazards and may cause injuries.
Failure to maintain the basic infrastructure of your warehouse can adversely affect your operations as well. For example, if you have floors with severely damaged concrete, your forklifts and their loads can be damaged by vibration while riding over them.
Using Paper
Managing your warehouse with paper is slow and inefficient. It requires the use of printers, ink, and paper. These items get costly over time. Paper is also bulky, and years of its use require rows of space-hoarding filing cabinets. Paper management is labour intensive and may reach a point where you will require a full-time filing clerk. Things happen more slowly because workflows depend on people manually filling out forms. Such a system is also error prone.If running your warehouse with paper frustrates you, consider using a paperless warehouse management system. You won’t spend money on ink, paper, printers, filing cabinets, or on filing clerks. Your order fulfilment will be faster with far fewer mistakes. These benefits only scratch the surface of what a warehouse management system can do for your warehouse operations. To learn more about this, please contact us.
