5 Reasons To Review Your Warehouse Operations

Five Compelling Reasons to Assess Your Warehouse Operations

Carrying out a regular review of your warehouse operations is a vital part of managing an efficient process. It helps to ensure you are well placed to adapt to changes in consumer demands, or a shift in your supply chain. Here are five reasons why you should review your warehouse management system to remain efficient:

Alignment with Customer Demands and Customer Satisfaction

The combination of Brexit and the global pandemic has dramatically accelerated the pace of change for customer requirements, which has directly impacted warehouse operations and inventory management to ensure these customer expectations and demands are being met.
The pressures on your ability to react to customer demands, from a distribution perspective, have changed hugely in last couple of years. If you’ve not reviewed your warehouse operations recently, it’s unlikely that you will be aligned with your customers’ expectations; either now or very soon. It’s important to ask yourself, “Are we a good fit for our customers and their demands?” The only way you’ll know is to focus on achieving operational alignment with your strategic objectives.

Technology Integration

Unquestionably, the rate of technological progress has been significant in recent years. There is so much new technology available that could be making a huge impact on your operational efficiency.
A good example of technology integration into warehouses could be the implementation of sensors or drones in order to track assets and ensure quality control – they are often also used to monitor critical processes, such as managing inventory tracking and order fulfilment in order to increase customer satisfaction. You could also use technology to ensure you have the right warehouse layout (within your unique warehouse space) and right inventory storage equipment for optimal productivity and maximum ease when it comes to day to day operations in order to improve efficiency.
It’s vital that you explore the available options to gather key performance indicators and ensure you’re not missing an opportunity to keep your warehouse operations and business growth objectives highly relevant through its integration, in a cost effective way.

Warehouse Efficiency Benefits

These should be reviewed periodically as part of your continuous improvement programme – you want to make sure that you remain competitive and automate processes. Any review carried out at an operational level should look for increased efficiency opportunities. Some of the most common warehouse efficiency benefits include:

• happier labour force and warehouse managers
• reduced picking error
• lowered operating costs
• increased productivity
• more streamlined warehouse management systems (wms)

It’s highly possible you can have efficient processes that are not effective or useful to the business and its growth. Here you should concentrate on future planning to ensure you maximise the company’s agility and warehouse performance to be able to respond to changes, while remaining both efficient and effective.

Risk Management & Planning

Continuing on the forward planning theme, it’s essential to look ahead for risk management and effective risk planning.
We have experienced an extremely turbulent supply chain due to Brexit / COVID, so now we are on the other side of this it’s vital to review your supply chain operations, identify the challenges through risk assessment, and then devise an effective risk management process to enable your warehouse operations to cope with future potential changes to your supply chain and warehouse processes.

Staff Engagement & Retention

If you conduct regular review processes of your warehouse operation it should help to engage your employees, as it will

a) show you are looking to improve their working environment and

b) allow you to hear their thoughts and act upon them.

An inclusive approach from management with regular reviews will offer the level of engagement with your workforce, vital for warehouse staff productivity and, crucially, staff retention.

SEC Storage

To benefit from an efficient warehouse it’s important to understand every element of your warehouse operations, and ensure that it is running as efficiently and optimally as possible. To enhance your storage efficiency through warehouse intelligence, get in touch with us today by calling us on 01438 731990 or fill in an enquiry form.