Your warehouse is a major part of advancement within your company, having a good warehouse strategy in place will go a long way to ensure the success of your business.

We have collated some tips below to help you put a successful warehouse strategy in place.

Look at your existing processes.

Take a note of all your staff responsibilities and the processes in place within each section, including all equipment they use. This will help you to establish what exactly is happening on your warehouse floor. By doing this is it can often highlight areas that are not running quite as you would expect or like.

Speak with your staff and spend some time with all your employees, this can give you a better picture of the processes and operations being followed and the impact they might be having on productivity. This also gives employees a sense of importance and being valued.

By undertaking the above actions along with creating a ‘to-scale’ drawing of your warehouse building, this will aid creating your strategy going forward as you will be able to see what improvements will need to be made.

What are your inventory requirements?

Now you have a good idea of everything happening in your warehouse you can look at your inventory requirements. To do this, you will need to plan and predict the amount of stock coming into your warehouse and determine where you will need to store this stock and its movements.

Carefully consider your estimating when it comes to your inventory, think about seasonality and high selling products. Use previous information gathered to make accurate estimates and organise these items based on their material handling and storage traits. Each business will have different requirements based on products sold.

Look for weaknesses and areas that can be improved or changed within your warehouse.

No warehouse is ever perfect, look for areas that can be improved within your operation.

It could be that you may need to update your infrastructure to store certain products or goods. Take a good look at your current facilities and equipment and determine the most efficient ways to improve these with practical solutions.

Find suitable alternative solutions.

Only you can identify areas that are and are not working effectively for your warehouse operation. If something is not working consider alternative solutions for improvement. It could be that your current warehouse facility needs improving or equipment and staff processes need to be changed. For a successful warehouse operation, you need to find alternative solutions to fix flaws in the way things are run.

Planning.

When it comes to implementing your new plans make sure you assess and consider the following:

Financial planning:

– Total operation costs

– Time value of money

– Tax

When conducting a qualitative analysis look at:

– How you will adjust to changes

– Managing the new plan and how it easy it is

– Inventory damage

– Staff safety

Finally, update your plan.

Based on the steps above and assessments you have made you are ready to get your master warehouse strategy in place. The strategy should include the following:

– Space

– Staff

– Equipment and Processes

– Future Plans

You must remember that your warehouse should be regularly updated so you continue to operate at maximum efficiency.

Need to improve your warehouse?

Get in Touch with Advanced Handling & Storage

If you want to maximise your warehouse space through the use of second hand or new pallet racking, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 0800 345 7088 or send an email to [email protected]

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