Warehousing – owm blogs

Warehousing Operations

OWM Logistics — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:59:00 +0000

What are warehousing operations? How is warehousing equipment used? What are the three types of warehouse configurations? The primary responsibility of a warehouse manager is to ensure that goods are stored and retrieved in an efficient and orderly manner. These duties can be performed by a range of people, from hourly employees to corporate executives, depending on the size of the company. Warehousing operations are the core function in any supply chain. This publication is designed to offer guidance to anyone involved in warehousing and distribution. The warehouse has traditionally consisted of two or more aisles, with the aisles separated by a physical barrier. Products were stored on shelves along the walls of the aisle and in racks at the end of each aisle. Warehousing operations are concerned with the storage, handling, and distribution of goods and materials. These operations may also be used for manufacturing or other kinds of industrial processing. It’s possible that a warehouse is one building or that it might have many buildings.

Warehouse Problems and its ultimate solutions

OWM Logistics — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 13:30:00 +0000

Warehouses are finding themselves in increasingly volatile situations as faraway events in the global supply chain have an impact on local firms. When dealing with these difficulties, the best solution for your warehouse’s lifespan and sustainability is to ensure that you have flexible and scalable systems in place that adhere to industry best practices.

1. Inventory Accuracy

Inaccurate inventory leads to issues such as maintaining inaccurate stock levels and stockpiles of obsolete inventory. Picking issues occur as a result of pickers relying on erroneous information, resulting in inefficient operations. Other consequences of faulty inventory include decreased productivity, greater expenses, and corresponding revenue loss.

Solution:

Craftsman’s Warehouse Management System (WMS) helps to automate data-recording processes, provides real-time and reliable information about stock levels and composition. The technology helps the user to visualize the pallet location, id, quantity and any other relevant data necessary for the ease of operations.

2. Space Utilization

Space utilization is a major success factor in warehousing. In warehouses with poor facility layouts, insufficient storage capacity and inefficient utilization of limited space are major challenges. Managers are concerned about unfavorable warehouse design because it has a direct correlation to a potential negative impact on profits. Furthermore, warehouses near population centers sometimes occupy the more expensive property, which raises prices.

Solution:

The optimal warehouse plan considers both the available floor area and the available vertical space. A good plan not only maximizes the use of space, but also the utilization of equipment and labor, accessibility to all goods, the security of all items, and the safety of workers. Stacker cranes help to achieve volumetric efficiency whereas conventional MHEs take up more horizontal and vertical area. Our Vertical storage system – Vstore saves the floor space up to 80% when compared to other static systems.

3. Redundant Activities

Many warehouses are plagued by unnecessary, excessive product handling, with cases or pallets being transferred through many intermediate locations. However, redundant actions are not always visible. Duplicate data entry and information duplication are two key time wasters.

Solution:

Our barcode reading technology in ASRS reduces the part details entry time and sends the input directly to IPC, thus improving the warehousing process by eliminating unnecessary operations and better user interface. Automated systems are continuously evolving, and are the worldwide trends to drive the process owners by keeping up-to-date technologies in order to quickly adapt and prosper, not just survive.

4. Labour Cost

Excellent warehouse managers try to maximize productivity while minimizing labor expenditures in a labor-intensive environment; these costs can account for up to 65 percent of most warehouses’ operating budgets. Warehouses typically use expensive equipment and big labor groups, posing a difficulty that is specific to warehousing operations.

Solution:

The “goods to person” strategy reduces the amount of time spent walking from one pick location to another within a warehouse. The two basic approaches to tackling labor-related issues are minimizing available labor and replacing labor with automated technology.

5. Quality Control

In many situations, staff in charge of quality control also pick, pack, and ship inventory products, therefore many errors go undetected until they reach the client. This is especially true in a pandemic setting, as warehouses are attempting to transport more with fewer personnel available.

A quality control feature can track vendor accuracy, increase stock rotation, and eliminate the requirement for manual warehouse processing. Quality control methods ensure that the rest of the warehouse management program works properly.

Solution:

Consider a holistic system with updated WMS technology to ensure the flexibility required to manage any storm. The more transparent and available your data is, the more you can decrease these risks and have a constant, trustworthy warehouse analysis methods in which staff and customers can find maximum efficiency and trust.

Reducing Warehousing Costs

OWM Logistics — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:53:00 +0000

Every warehouse requires Thousands of SQFT areas along with huge consumption of resources like manpower, electricity, storage systems, lifting, and material handling equipment. Most industries don’t have a regulated methodology to assess this significant costs.

The Pie chart Below shows the factors and their respective % which affects the Warehousing costs.

Inventory Management

Managing the inventory plays a major role in streamlining the warehouse operations, this involves maintaining the data of the products stored in the warehouse-like their name, ID, location, quantity, date of shipments, transit details, shelf life, etc. A properly maintained inventory complements the ease of access to all the other 3 factors by

Easing Replenishment
Identification of the picking items
Auto-update of the available stocks
Generate reports for easy evaluation
Maintaining a full proof database

All our automated systems like the Pallet AS/RS, Shuttle AS/RS, VStore, Crato – Bin shuttle, Mobile Pallet Racking, and Mini Load AS/RS incorporated with Our ERP and WMS enabling a great platform for to smooth the warehouse operations. Thanks to our in-house ERP which incorporates with external sensors and IOT for managing data efficiently thereby reducing the operation cost and better utilization of the resources.

Put Away and Retrieval

Accessing , monitoring, retrieving and put away takes much time when the warehouse size is large. In addition to this, when the height of the building is also utilized it needs to be oriented properly with easy and well-defined visual identification to enable the operators to access the materials quickly. So, we design storage solutions like Selective Pallet Racking, Shelving, drive-in racks, VStore, and AS/RS before its construction to align its orientation along with the docks/staging area so that put away and retrieval operations take place easily and efficiently.

Order Picking

Picking the exact order is very significant to get it delivered on time, in right quantities, with right quality, at right place, and to the right person, in order to reduce material handling and returning costs and to increase the maximum satisfaction of customers, the storage systems are designed to complement the material flow with different types of order picking techniques.

An automated vertical storage system like the VStore is well suited for piecewise picking, batch picking, zone picking, and cluster picking. And an AS/RS can be designed to offer the desired type of picking based on the user’s operation whilst maintaining FIFO or LIFO and cutting down movement costs. Static Storage solutions also offer wave picking, piece picking, zone picking, and batch picking which is manually monitored and adds more costs to ensure continuous material movement.

Material Handling

Reducing the handling costs by implementing the AS/RS systems, below are the comparative results between dedicated MHE and AS/RS.

SNo	Dedicated MHE	AS/RS
1	Requires skilled labour	Anyone can operate
2	Requires certification and extensive training	Easy to train and adapt
3	Highly expensive maintenance	Cheaper periodic maintenance
4	Involves the risk of disasters	Trouble-free operation
5	The possibility to become a bottleneck	Designed to avoid any bottleneck operations
6	System height is limited to MHE	Not limited by height

In addition to this throughput, the number of pallets handled per hour, error identification, ease of use and many more factors bring down the cost of operation significantly in the long run. For a low throughput warehouse with a lower storage need, static solutions tend to be the best option in the long run.

Sort and Access

Sorting mostly takes place during the inbound of the materials and outbound of the materials, if we can manage this flow ideally from the start then costs are well maintained till the end. Sorting the materials helps to maintain a bird’s eye view over all the above-mentioned processes and makes the verification of the stocks and operations in a warehouse much easier, providing more time to dispense on the core activities. A few types of sorting systems are cross belt sorting, line sorter, shoe sorter, etc.

For a warehouse to be a profit center all these factors are to be considered from planning the building to the storage of goods till the last-mile delivery of the supply chain.