Supply chain executives today are faced with challenging technological advancements and ever-changing demands from consumers to provide top-notch service and warehouse labor efficiency. There are several ways to optimize your warehouse labor systems, which in return will reduce operating expenses and protect your margins. After all, at least 50% of warehouse labor resources are usually involved in picking, packing and shipping outbound orders.
JASCI provides warehouse management systems to collate the different factions of order fulfillment and management, while delivering real-time metrics in a user-friendly interface. Your business can continually increase its labor efficiency by reorganizing its warehouse based on updated consumer demand, managing worker efficiency, getting feedback in real-time, and as a result deliver effective solutions to your consumers.
Read on to find out how optimizing your warehouse labor can to keep your company on top of its day-to-day operations as labor becomes scarce and payroll costs double.
1) Slotting Technology Optimizes Where to Put Products in a Warehouse
Warehouse slotting determines the most appropriate storage location for each item in your warehouse. Effective slotting techniques can be implemented and optimized through a cloud WMS (warehouse management system). Properly organizing your warehouse to promote productivity and space utilization is one way you can keep your costs low while keeping productivity high.
Making sure you match the fastest moving items to the best locations, rank all items by frequency of use, consider the characteristics of your slot size, durability, material, and weight are not easy tasks, but should be the main focus. Slotting technology can assist you with these warehouse operations to maximize efficiency.
With JASCI’s cloud-based warehouse management system slotting technology available to you, you have the intelligence that continuously directs and optimizes slotting tasks based on velocity, movements & product history. This reduces the inevitable human error of manual entry and stops wasted time occurring, such as searching for certain locations.
JASCI also determines locations based in real time, manages locations based on special handling requirements, maintains lot and date control, to name a few functions. Using this information, you will be able to slot your products to keep up with consumer demands by keeping your warehouse optimally organized.
2) Travel Time When Picking is a Huge Labor Cost
Travel time during order picking can massively increase your labor costs. According to some sources, travel time can take up to 50% of the overall order picking time. Managing how your team picks products is essential to decreasing labor costs and improving warehouse labor productivity. By incorporating innovative and scalable technology, you can optimize travel time.
JASCI’s labor management software provides intelligence that can make a huge difference to you order picking times. By setting up labor forecasting and providing real-time order picking metrics, your orders can be successfully managed and tracked so you can analyze travel time and accurately determine better performance techniques for your team. Using the data visuals and analytics presented in our software, you can increase predictability, accuracy, and speed of order picking in the warehouse.
3) Inefficient Pick-Path, Zoning your Warehouse to Create Better Pick-Paths
If your warehouse is not set up to provide an efficient pick-path, its staff will need more time to pick each order. This increases your labor costs. By setting up your warehouse in a more efficient pick-path route, you will lower labor costs and orders will be fulfilled more quickly. Your workers also won’t be exhausted, meaning they’ll be less prone to injury, error, and declines in productivity.
Knowing how to zone your warehouse to create better pick-paths can be tricky. You are likely trying to do more with less while fitting the zoning into an existing location, or determining how to develop a new distribution center or warehouse to better fit your company’s needs. By incorporating JASCI’s SmartTask workflow for picking execution, you can increase productivity and decrease labor costs. Inventory management technology can help you know exactly which inventory is picked most often so you can place it in a prime location to improve the efficiency of your pick-path.
4) Staff Feedback in Real-Time
Keeping your staff feeling appreciated and recognized for their hard work is essential to operating a productive and optimized warehouse. Incorporating JASCI’s labor productivity technologies in your warehouse can provide you with the ability to see real-time results and performance analytics. Seeing accurate metrics on worker performance in the moment provides you with the unique opportunity to reward effective workers instantly or to organize a performance-based touch base with staff who have room for improvement in the moment.
Your JASCI dashboard can include the key performance indicators (KPIs) that work most effectively for your team. By setting daily goals or targets, measuring success or improvement areas, and determining better slotting and pick-path techniques on the go with real-time worker feedback, your warehouse productivity can be drastically improved.
Giving your employees the opportunity to contribute to the narrative on how to optimize the warehouse for both their needs and order fulfillment productivity, you can increase their feeling of ownership over providing top-quality and fast service for your customers and increase labor force retention.
5) Waveless Order Streaming
In today’s rapidly changing marketplace and with growing technological capacity to efficiently adapt business procedures to speed throughout, waveless order release is a new way to process large groups of orders in one batch. Companies are incorporating waveless order release technologies to revolutionize their workflow and compete with ever-growing supply and demand operations.
With JASCI’s new Gravity Waveless Technology, your warehouse will transform into an efficient, well-oiled machine. Gravity is a flexible system that dynamically allocates work based on priorities determined by the warehouse management team. Gravity is a flexible, powerful technology that transcends traditional wave management systems to provide a far more effective and accessible platform for order fulfillment and management. Among its skills, Gravity can manage receiving, put-away, replenishment, cycle counts, location audits, slotting, and all order fulfillment functions while providing real-time analytics and metrics. Lift yourself above the competition while simplifying your order management technology.
6) Cluster and Batch Picking
By knowing which products are ordered more frequently and which are often ordered together, you can incorporate cluster and batch picking into your existing order management system. Batch picking is when one picker picks a group, or batch, of orders at the same time, one SKU at a time. Custer picking is a methodology of picking into multiple order containers at one time. JASCI’s order management software can help you develop cluster and batch picking systems to optimize your warehouse efficiency.
A WMS that shows real-time analytics and metrics will also help optimize your warehouse cluster and batch picking techniques. And with the capacity of JASCI’s SmartTask workflow to adapt to unique systems and integrate both warehouse management and order management systems, your order fulfillment can be streamlined with cluster and batch picking to maximize efficiency.
Conclusion
If your own operation is unable to grow because you just can’t seem to rein in the chaos, it might be time to consider some of the above strategies to optimize your warehouse labor. Remember, integrating labor management with a company’s warehouse management system, can reduce costs up to 30%. Contact us at JASCI today to learn how our software can help optimize your warehouse labor.