F. Curtis Barry & Company Blog

Many managers look only at the negatives when talking about warehouse productivity. But, most people want to be in alignment with your productivity goals and to contribute in meaningful ways to the success of your business.

As I conduct an operational assessment with companies focusing on benchmarking and productivity, I find many companies do not openly share their warehouse KPIs and results with employees. Many don’t even have a formal, weekly process for capturing and reporting the KPIs. Those that do a good job of the weekly reporting often don’t have department and individual employee productivity goals and don’t publicly publish the results. You can’t improve something you haven’t measured.

An agile supply chain is a system of product distribution that:

There are several basic principles that apply to warehouse layout design and running an effective distribution center operation. Without the proper layout and design of your distribution center, no matter the square footage, you will face capacity issues, decreased productivity, and storage inadequacies. 

In this blog, we’ll discuss the 28 key principles that you should consider for warehouse layout design and productivity.

Order picking is one of the most important functions in the warehouse - whether the customer has a positive or negative experience is based on the results of the picking process. Order accuracy and timely order fulfillment are keys to a successful customer experience. In addition to being a determining factor for customer satisfaction, picking and packing are generally the two areas where companies can gain the most significant labor cost savings.

As we consult with multichannel companies on system selection and implementation, our experience is that about 50% of the larger installs (those spending over $1 million) are not delivered on time or within budget. 

For many companies, project failure is generally defined by the degree of cost over-run.  Schedule slippages go hand-in-hand with added costs since there is considerably more complexity to the total change than originally planned.  Many times, the newly installed system does not live up to the functional expectations of the user community and does not deliver the desired benefits.

Warehouses are expensive for companies to operate considering the total fulfillment costs of labor, occupancy, and storage and material handling assets. Often, warehouse space is 15 to 20% of the cost per order.

Increasing capacity of the warehouse should not be confined to changes in space use and increasing stock locations only. The assessment and solutions need to take into account the warehouse layout, product flow, labor efficiency, storage and material handling options, safety, throughput, and warehousing system functions, to name a few elements. It’s the integration of these elements that makes for efficiency.

Many businesses moved from inventory management system solely maintaining records and reporting on inventory to more strategic inventory requirements to plan, project and fill customer orders and improve profitability. With all of the options available today, how do you know which solution will work best for you and your business? And what features should you be looking for?

Even with technology advancements and headlines alluding to robot-operated warehouses, most fulfillment centers and warehouses rely on manual labor. In fact, only the largest companies employ and justify advanced automation. Despite the cost prohibitiveness of automation for many companies, manual labor is not cheap, either.

The function of a spare parts warehouse is to stock all critical inventory parts, material, and tools necessary to maintain and keep a manufacturing line up and operational.  Often, spare parts warehouses are treated as a stepchild to the procurement or manufacturing of a business.  Neglecting your spare parts warehouses will not benefit your business as they often must go through transitions to improve their support of growing production volumes.