Warehouse Operations in Australia: How to Spring Clean Your Inventory

Have you ever struggled to find space to store inventory? This might just be the sign that it’s time to "spring clean" your warehouse operations and processes - perfect timing for those in Australia and New Zealand. Having a tidy warehouse has many benefits: It can help prevent accidents, items can be easily identified and found, and products picked and shipped more quickly. It's also good for staff morale.

Are you experiencing flaws in your warehouse operations? Does stock ever go missing? Are your operational processes slowing your warehouse down? Do you need to update your inventory mobile solutions processes? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may want to consider investing time to evaluate your warehouse and processes - regardless of the season! Here are some areas you can focus on:

Clean Up Clutter

• Items identified as obsolete, redundant or are worthy of a fire sale, should be identified and addressed
• Warehouse aisles and rows should have no clutter in them; everything needs to have a place
• Correct stock placement and labelling should be reviewed and warehouse signage revised

Update Receiving Processes

Traditional receiving docks suffer from two major problems:

• Hidden Costs from extra footsteps taken by workers walking back and forth to a stationary printer for labels. Reviewing your warehouse layout through your inventory system can ensure your paths are efficient.  
• Mistakes in Putaway when pallets left alone on the dock get mislabeled or put away without any labels at all. Utilizing cross-docking can ensure the items on backorder skip the putaway process and are immediately taken to where they are needed.

Evaluate Your Floor Plan

Whether you previously identified an area of bottleneck in your warehouse or figured out how to improve the warehouse flow by augmenting the floor plan, now would be the perfect time to make changes. You may want to review your current warehouse picking strategies.

The distance your worker has to travel in the warehouse has a significant affect on productivity. By reducing the distance and optimizing their picking route, the picker won't have to inefficiently travel back and forth across the warehouse to collect items. It is integral to set up your warehouse organization to limit travel distance and increase the efficiency of the picking. Here are some questions to ask as you evaluate your picking strategy:

• Are high-volume items placed in easy-to-access locations?
• Can workers can pick multiple orders at once? 
• Can your workers easily move orders from a staging location to pack/ship stations?

Want to learn more about how you can keep your inventory accurate and your warehouse at it's best? Listen to the Taking Inventory podcast episode, What Starts Right, Ends Right.

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