Management of warehouses by purchase professionals
There has been a trend these days to make purchasing professionals responsible for management of the warehouse. This can indeed be considered a logical step given the similarities between purchasing and warehouse management.
To begin with, use of metrics is common both to purchasing professionals and warehouse performance, too. As a purchasing officer with the responsibility of warehousing, you can start with these metrics as pick lines per hour, orders processed per hour and the age of oldest unshipped order.
Similar to that in purchasing, you can adopt many practices in warehouse management too. Two of such practices can be effective slotting tools and bar coding.
Effective slotting tools include the placement of high-volume items close to the point of shipping, use of clear slotting information under each item on the shelf, using the same slotting information on pick documents, and sorting the slot numbers into a sequence that supports a “no-backtrack” path for the picker.
Bar codes can help ensure that the right incoming product is put in the right place and that the right outgoing product is picked in the right quantities. Bar code picking ensures a faster and an accurate picking. This leads to cost savings and the result in noticed in just about six months. Managing warehouse efficiently can lead to labor cost savings of 30 to 50%.
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