So you work in retail or provide services for a retailer, manage a manual warehouse requiring lots of individual or low volume items to be picked regularly and have a warehouse management system that manages warehouse tasks. What else is left to automate, speed up though put and lower cost?
Here is what you’ve automated so far:
- ASN at goods receipt for faster supplier shipment unloading
- Delivery booking system that is flexible enough to plan your work and ensure a prioritisation of delivered stock to meet retail store needs
- Putaway and stock movement at goods receipt including tracking of putaway stock without SAP or central order system booking references, just-in-time processes to allocate receipted stock immediately to despatch based on batch and stock control, with other rules, plus automated unit of measure conversions at receipt for everything from fresh fish to hanging meat meat, bread or non-food or perishable items
- Order management, allocation to stock, release and pick list production that can be used with a variety of hardware and can work with both online retail and conventional high street or out of town store retail
- Bar code scanning for stock movement, picking, packing, value added service tracking, marshalling and at despatch for loading
Well if you do have all the above, here are 6 more ideas for you:
1. Consider carousel picking
Perfect for low volume, small retail store throughput items and can integrate fully with warehouse management system software. These systems can help save space and picking time.
2. Speed up training with voice technology
An area often over looked is when voice technology is used in a warehouse is, the time taken to train new employees “off the street” to pick at “average levels” which can be dramatically reduced using this type of technology. Plus voice technology can help overcome language challenges e.g. if a new joins first language is not the same as the native tongue of the country.
3. Use voice technology in other areas of the warehouse
Voice technology can be applied to other retail warehouse areas such as goods receipt, marshalling, despatch and inventory checking. Rather than printing off check lists pr carrying around a scanner voice headsets enable both hands to be used and task verification to be completed without the extra duty of finding a scanner, confirming tasks on a screen or scanning a bar code.
4. Make your quality management processes more efficient using digital pens
From lift truck checks to health and safety forms, staff briefings and training digital pens can dramatically speed up your administration and give you better control.
5. Integrate RFID or wireless tracking
For tracking pallets and containers arriving and departing the warehouse to automatically tracking pallet movements into and out of locations, verifying correct truck loads and linking to visual and audio signals alerting personnel of errors, RFID and wireless tracking removes the need for check digit and bar code scanning verification.
6. Track employees and their work outside picking and truck movement tasks
Numerous warehouse jobs exist that many warehouse management systems do not track or record productivity data. Using warehouse productivity improvement tools this can be rectified. Using these tools and techniques can further lead to dramatic warehouse productivity savings.