A warehouse is not only a place to store and release goods as and when required but an integral part of any business strategy. Therefore, running a perfect warehouse operation from the word go requires special skills to work in a multidimensional way in order to maintain smooth functioning all along.
The person responsible for its handling needs to perform several tasks at a time like supervising products, ensuring the quality and quantity of goods, maximising the available space and labour efficiency, minimising operating cost, motivating employees, ensuring the working conditions of tools and equipments and meeting clients and key staff.
Below we have described a few things that play a vital role in warehouse functioning. So read along to find out how you can do it all in a better way.
1. Proper working conditions
- Ensure working areas are adequately lit – Working in proper light is not only good for employees so that they can deal with materials better and root out discrepancies if any. It helps enhance the scrutiny regarding the quality of the goods and make employees work efficiently.
- Train your employees – All the employees hired by the company might not be aware of stock handling. So before assigning them with tasks and responsibilities, train them thoroughly to get the best and most productive result.
- Ensure safety of equipments – It’s always better to check all the equipments and machines of the warehouse from time to time to reduce the chances of any mishap at the workplace.
- Enforce fire safety – Flouting fire safety norms can cost your warehouse a lot as it stores the overall production so it is always advisable to enforce the safety rules strictly.
- Maximising space – To make the warehouse more spacious, you can narrow the aisles and make the storage units taller. Try to use all the space available in the area. In this way, you can increase the storage capacity without expanding the room externally.
2. Relations with staff
- Communicate regularly – Regular communication with your employees will keep you updated on all the internal information, requirements of the warehouse, working conditions and much more. It will not only build a healthy relationship between you and your employees but also increase the productivity of the warehouse.
- Motivate and review work performances – Motivation boosts work capacity. So always inspire your staff members for quality work and also conduct performance reviews periodically.
3. Maintaining assets and equipment
- Ensure there’s ‘no pilferage’ – Theft or pilferage is a serious threat to an organisation; your warehouse is bound to have raw and finished materials and other assets of value. . Any kind of loss can cause financial as well as intellectual loss to the organisation. So make sure that you have made enough arrangements to safeguard all assets and equipments.
- Keep the equipments ready for work – Ensure all the devices and machines of the warehouse are up and running to avoid any kind of interruption in the production and movement of materials. If the devices have any issue that hampers their performance, get them fixed as soon as possible.
- Maintain work capacity of equipments – If an equipment or a piece of machinery not performing up to the mark then it’s simply wasting the time and efforts of employees and affecting the overall productivity of as well. So check all equipments from time to time and get them replaced whenever required.
4. Supervising warehouse’s functions
- Set up an efficient organisation system – For setting up an efficient organising system, store the goods in heavy-duty plastic storage boxes and put proper labels to identify its contents. It will help you find and locate the goods easily. You can also put labels on the aisle to easily navigate through the store.
- Inspect your stock regularly – The primary goal of any organisation is to supply goods whenever required. So it’s better to check your stock regularly to ensure that the store has sufficient quantities for all the upcoming deliveries.
Enforce these tips and tricks to your warehouse operations and see how smooth the functions become. Having a structure and process in place simplifies the logistics of a warehouse operation as well so ensure that you have a system that supports your activities.
