Simple re-organization of a logistics warehouse

The year 2020, which was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, was also a year of contrasts for companies: While some companies drew a disastrous balance, others benefited greatly from the situation. Online retail in particular has never been in such good shape! But did all the winning companies manage to rise to the occasion? The explosion in demand revealed organizational weaknesses in many companies: The situation required a high degree of adaptability to cope with this unexpected demand. Due to a lack of preparation, shipping departments and customer service were often overwhelmed or even completely disorganized.

ACD Group offers tips and tools to improve your ability to adapt to fluctuations in demand and make the difference against your less prepared competitors. Discover our nine tips, divided into three types of organizational changes, for easy implementation in your warehouse:

• Three quick and easy solutions to implement
• Three solutions with a small investment and quick ROI
• Three solutions with larger investment and significant long-term ROI

The impact of warehousing on team efficiency and engagement is generally underestimated. The advice seems simple: systematic warehouse maintenance, including daily waste removal, is a real value-add for productivity. It’s not always necessary to invest in dedicated staff or equipment to do this: Making employees aware of the problem and including cleaning tasks and their control in their duties can be enough to establish a culture of cleanliness and order in the company. The goal:

• Enable unimpeded movement of vehicles, elevators and mobile workstations
• Safeguard goods
• Limit the risk of accidents and incidents
• Improve the working environment of teams, with a direct impact on their mentality and motivation

Cross-docking is the solution when you receive many individual orders for the same packaging unit. It allows you to skip individual shipping steps: Goods from suppliers are pre-labeled to enable direct shipping to the end customer. So the products are not stored, but processed and forwarded directly when they arrive at the distribution platform.

The permanent inventory has many advantages over the annual inventory. It is easy to perform with adapted software and requires a periodic count of the stocks. For each item, the frequency of inventory is determined by the inventory turnover rate. The advantages of the rotating inventory for warehouse management are:

• Reduces the constraints imposed by annual or semi-annual inventory
• Avoid stock-outs because the frequency is matched to the turnover rate of each item
• Makes it possible to quickly correct differences between theoretical stock and physical stock

ACD Group offers the latest generation of mobile data capture and identification devices to help you manage your inventory and set up a rotating inventory system.

The goods receiving process is crucial in the warehouse, as it is the starting point of logistics operations. With warehouse software, you can create efficient protocols to reduce the risk of errors and congestion at the receiving docks. It is possible to forecast incoming stock, register products, label items and manage the location of goods by optimizing space. WMS software is also a valuable aid in managing the receipt of non-conforming or non-ordered products, cross-docking or the return of goods. To identify incoming items and enter them into the WMS, ACD offers a wide range of solutions to automate and modernize the receiving process. For example, investing in a Mobile Workstation has a return on investment within six months, as the receiving process can be optimized and unnecessary hidden costs can be easily eliminated.

Modernizing your warehouse will inevitably result in a migration to Android: The announced end of Windows CE/Mobile means there will be no more software patches or security fixes for mobile solutions. It is important to plan for migration to the Android operating system in order to remain competitive and prepare for a peak in demand like 2020. ACD Group can help you migrate your data collection and identification devices to Android Industrial+, a next-generation operating system with enhanced enterprise security.

By the end of this extraordinary year, your usual routines may have changed permanently. It’s a good idea to look back and see if the functionality of your floor plan is still optimal. If there is a lack of space in certain logistics areas, it’s probably time to review your overall space organization. There are several parameters to consider:

• Efficiency, productivity, reduced walking distances and handling
• Occupational safety
• Ventilation, lighting and quality of the working and storage environment
• Optimizing the use of space, both horizontally and vertically

The investment will be higher if you decide to rethink your vertical organization and these changes include the use of cranes and new elevators, or if you opt for mobile workstations to streamline your processes. But such a reform is justified by a high return on investment (ROI) ratio.