Warehousing operations are becoming more complex and challenging with respect to the space availability and its optimum utilisation. Asim Behera explains more on the best practices in this direction.

Indian manufacturing industry has witnessed the fast-paced advancement in the past few decades and every manufacturing industry is becoming a part of the journey. New tax policies, i.e. GST has played a vital role in the manufacturing sector as well as in the development of the country by taking an initiative in the progress of the businesses. 

Supply chain logistics has continuously changed and evolved, as the warehousing sector has to advance at the same pace. The warehousing managers always face the challenges in utilising and optimising the warehouse space. Warehousing play a major role in any manufacturing industry and its costs are an account of cumulative costs of labour, inventory, finished goods, building and land. Warehouses are expensive to operate for the companies.

To get the most out of the warehousing, a number of best practices can be opted to improve the productivity and overall process in the manufacturing facility. Although the best practices vary from industry to industry, there are some best practices from Daifuku, experts in material handling, warehousing and logistics management, which helps in utilising the warehouse SPACE optimally and handles products with care.

• S - Scope of expansion and ease
• P - Pace up the movement of units
• A - Avoid wastage of resources
• C - Carryout the process in flows
• E - Escalate the process

These elements will help one in utilising and governing the process in the right direction. Each element is significant and complementary to each other. Implementing these practices can make an impact on the warehousing facility processes.

Scope of expansion and ease
With the faster pace of growth, there is also growth in land usage; this had lead to scarcity of land for horizontal expansion. This creates a desperate need of implementing the vertical warehousing, as the horizontal extension has huge investment associated with it. Vertical storage allows storing bulk items in a confined space and provides more space for store keeping units (SKUs). To ensure the product stored in these vertical storage, automated systems are the simplest and advanced solution. The automated systems help track down the items stored on regular basis and also favour the FIFO patterns. Maximising space utilisation can help with keeping inventory visible and easy to find.

Pace up the movement of units
A plan should be such to allow free and fast movement of material in and out of the system without any loss or delays. The dispatch and receive movements should not contradict each other while in operations. Using the storage area with the optimal storing of items for the size (for example, if a rack is designed for the units of 3*3 and is stored in the 2*2 unit, one has stored air in 1*1 area), if there is a fixed location for a specific bin, one can free up space in the warehouse and company no longer pays for storing air around the items. Use specific containers like boxes, pallets, etc for storing items which will help in utilising the rack areas optimally.

Avoid wastage of resources
Now that you have been using the space optimally, avoid wastage in the warehouses.  There are various wastages in warehouses such as visible and hidden, the hidden wastages are more significant in causing the productivity loss. One can avoid delays in the warehouse by ensuring the optimisation of two elements: equipment and personnel. By leveraging the resources appropriately like utilising time, labour and manual functioning as well as definite operations, one leads to achieve the continual waste elimination in the warehouse. The optimisation of space utilisation will help in ease of finding inventory, making it visible and avoiding unnecessary long travel times between the storage locations.

Carryout the process in flows
When a process is carried out in a warehouse, there is a number of questions that should be asked; what are the volumes of units can be stored? What are the storing bin requirements for the units? What are the arrival and dispatch cycles of the units? One should carry out a proper analysis of the product before storing it. This will help in optimal usage of the stored area and the company can plan for storing other items in the warehouse for further usage and customer satisfaction. The analysis carried out should be based on the product flows in the warehouse, position of storage, the time duration of storage, tracking of the product storage. For carrying out such operations one can use automated storage and retrieving systems, tracking systems for the storage bins.

Escalate the process
Following the four elements of SPACE, one can escalate their warehousing in a faster way which helps achieve improved productivity for the companies. Automated systems help to minimise the errors in the systems caused in manual systems, helps to monitor the storing and retrieving levels to achieve significant growth in the efficiencies. Escalating the operations will lead in reusing the resources such as manpower in other operations as well the delays will be reduced and will bring customer satisfaction.

A final word
Optimised warehouse layout helps to achieve greater efficiencies, minimises travel time, avoids wastages and helps to monitor the levels of processes. Daifuku India helps to achieve the optimised space utilisation of the warehouses in your manufacturing facility. The Daifuku caters a comprehensive range of products such as AS/RS, Unit Load AS/RS, Mini Load AS/RS, racking systems to its customers that meet their versatile needs in logistics and manufacturing. These systems help in gaining the significant productivity increase in the warehouse and improved efficiencies of manufacturing facilities.


Asim Behera is presently the COO at Factory Automation and Distribution Automation, Daifuku India.

Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asimbehera/