Warehouse efficiency
Warehouse efficiency is whether the work your people do needed doing at all. The extra walking, the extra replenishment trips and the picks from the wrong place usually come from how the warehouse is set up rather than how hard anybody works. It answers the third question a warehouse gets run on: is the warehouse set up to work efficiently?
Whether people produce what a reasonable operator produces is a different question, which sits under warehouse productivity.
How do you improve warehouse efficiency?
Look at the work that needn't happen before the people doing it. Most of it comes from stock sitting away from where it's picked, pick work grouped in a way that sends people walking and pick faces too small for the lines that move fastest. None of it needs a new WMS to find or fix.
In one warehouse we've worked in, pick work was grouped in a way that created a lot of avoidable travel. Redesigning how it was grouped cut that travel out and lifted pick efficiency, without touching the WMS.
Where should stock sit so people aren't walking for it?
The lines picked most often belong in the faces nearest the start of the route, at a comfortable height, with faces big enough not to need topping up all day. Slow lines belong further back or up in the air. The mistakes to look for are slow stock taking up prime faces and busy lines still being picked from bulk.
Fettle shows both today: how often each line is picked, where it sits, how full the location is and how long since anything moved. It's how eight sets of brake pads turned up in a full pallet location after 223 days, in a warehouse we've worked in.
AN ILLUSTRATION
Where the stock sits against how often it's picked
An illustration: a grid of pick locations shaded by how often each is picked, with the busiest nearest the start of the pick route. One location near the front is flagged: a full pallet location holding eight sets of brake pads, there for 223 days without anybody noticing.
An illustration of a pick-face map. The flagged location is a real finding from a parts warehouse we've worked in.
Slotting
Slotting is deciding which location each product lives in, based on how often it's picked, its size and what it tends to be picked with.
Pick face
A pick face is the location an operator picks from, as opposed to the bulk storage that refills it.
Picks from the right location
Picks from the right location is the share of picks taken from the face a product should sit in, rather than from bulk or wherever it ended up.
A low figure points straight at the moves worth making, which is why it's one of the most useful stock measures to watch.
Why do our pick faces need replenishing all day?
Usually because a fast-moving line has been given a face too small for what it sells, or sits where replenishment has a long way to travel to reach it. Every extra trip costs labour and forklift time, while a picker stood at an empty face costs more. Sizing the face to the line's real pick rate cuts the trips.
Fettle shows when replenishment happens against the picking through the day, along with the lines being picked where there isn't enough in the face to cover it.
More answers on warehouse efficiency
What avoidable work looks like
12.5%
More output from the same people, by regrouping the pick lists so pickers stopped queuing for the same aisles
A warehouse of around 600 people we've worked in, measured before and after the change
Pickers walked 950 metres to fill three cages, paying for the layout on every trip
The trolleys were more than half as wide as the aisles, so pickers parked at the end and walked every pick. It was a sensible way round a problem nobody had measured
See the avoidable work in a warehouse like yours
The demo takes about an hour and is set up for the kind of warehouse you run. It can start from this question.
Book a demo