Warehouses can be beautiful. When everyone works in harmony, processing items across the floor, it almost looks like a dance. However, warehouses are rarely perfect. There are common warehouse bottlenecks all warehouse managers and operators should know. By understanding potential pain areas, you can identify the problems in your own warehouse.
Receiving Processes
Nothing will slow down your warehouse like a bottlenecked receiving process. Checking in products that lack full documentation or are not part of the purchase order can lead to disorder and confusion. Your employees will struggle to store items that are improperly labeled.
Furthermore, you lose money when you receive damaged products or incomplete orders. Your warehouse must have a quality control method that reviews the product before it is received. The best warehouses have a software platform that keeps purchasing, receiving, and quality control updated.
Layout
If you want to increase your product throughput capacity overall, you must give your warehouse’s layout a lot of special attention. There are many ways you can maximize the efficiency of your layout. But the primary goal is to make it easy to pick and stock products.
Some managers choose to organize their warehouses so that their shelves stock from the back and pick up at the front. You should keep an eye on which products sell best so you can organize them for easy access. A solid warehouse layout allows stocking personnel to work without interfering with the picking crew.
Lack of Automation
The final point on our list of common warehouse bottlenecks is automation—the key to a successful processing system. Warehouses that lack barcodes and inventory control platforms are at a major disadvantage. Though you may appear to save money by forgoing this expense, you will pay for that mistake over and over again. Imagine the confusion and time wasted when you print multiple tickets for the same order. You will not be able to match the orders with the packing lists. You will spend way too much money on inventory because you cannot keep an accurate count. A barcode system can eliminate those concerns.