Top 10 Warehouse Organization Mistakes

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of warehouse organization on productivity, efficiency and morale. Tackle these 10 common mistakes to catapult your warehouse into the top echelon for performance.

1. Excess Inventory
Excess inventory ties up cash that could be used for other purposes and takes space in the warehouse. Excess inventory can delay every process — including picking, put away, cycle counting and restocking.

2. Suboptimum Warehouse Structure or Layout
Optimizing the warehouse layout can improve productivity and efficiency, helping cut order cycle times dramatically. Consider the types of materials you stock as well as their velocity when designing your warehouse layout.

3. Neglecting Staff Development
You can’t expect a person to perform a task accurately if you haven’t taken the time to properly train him or her. Put effort into training your employees and they will reward you with better efficiency and productivity as well as less turnover

4. Failing to Plan
Accurate forecasts result in much better material plans, but even without a good forecast you can take steps to reduce stock outs and ensure you have the right materials on hand. Implement min/max so you have visibility and insight into usage without going overboard on inventory.

5. Sloppy Housekeeping
Sloppy warehouses make it harder to find products and harder to find space to put goods away. In addition, sloppiness breeds apathy and lack of attention to detail. Straighten shelves, sweep floors and make sure every bin, pallet or box is clearly labeled to stay organized.

6. Poor Warehouse Safety Management
Accidents are expensive, in time and money as well as employee morale. People work better in an environment where they feel safe and cared about. Your employees need to know that you have taken proper warehouse safety steps and provide safety training and equipment.

7. Forgetting Work in Process
Some warehouses spend the last two weeks of the month pushing out customer orders and neglecting to feed work in process (WIP). Then, after the first of the month, there are no finished goods to fulfill customer orders. They rush to feed WIP. Take steps to balance priorities throughout the month to rebalance this cycle.

8. Not Measuring Performance
If it isn’t measured, it doesn’t improve. Decide what factors you care most about. Then measure against your KPIs. Watch your productivity soar.

9. Failure to Automate
Automated hardware and software are not more expensive than adding more heads or correcting mistakes. Invest in modern data collection and labeling solutions to increase efficiency and accuracy

10. Poorly Identified Materials
Speed up picking and put away by ensuring that all goods have legible labels or tags. Invest in high-quality labels and printers and make it easy for workers to label all materials as they’re received.

Proper warehouse organization is essential for staying competitive in the industry and having efficient processes. For more information about label solutions that can help prevent warehouse organizational mistakes, call 800.826.8260!

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