Warehouse Operations Assessment

warehouse operations assessmentWarehouse Operations Assessment

Whether your warehouse is owned, leased or operated by a 3PL provider, understanding the scale, cost and capability of the entire supply chain network is the key to long term viability.

Your organisation may be planning an acquisition, reshaping its supply chain or simply looking to consolidate and control supply chain costs. 

Our warehouse management assessment offers the opportunity of understanding scale, cost and capability through the use of 3D simulation.

We take a look at your entire warehouse operation, how inventory moves through the facility, its storage, handling and retrieval, towards final despatch. The layout is reviewed to understand the types of storage systems being used, their level of efficiency, fit and utilisation to support the operation.

We simply attach ourselves to an order and work through each stage of your operations, observing the flow, time taken and potential opportunities to remove obstacles that create delay and add cost to your business. In every assessment we have conducted, our focus has been on the following areas:

SYSTEMS

We need to understand how your warehouse operation receives its work each day, the workflow process from initial customer order through to release and confirmation of picking slip. The path of any documentation that accompanies this workflow helps understand complexity and the opportunity for implementing smarter, more automated processes that speed up the order release to confirmation cycle. Management reports, the accuracy and timing of systems updates will have an impact on the quality of all reports and their use in managing the operation.

PEOPLE

Your warehouse operation and its success are dependent on the quality of its personnel as they navigate each day within a constrained operational environment. From the quality of your staff selection process, on-boarding process and performance management review program, we take a look at how much support an employee is provided and identify development opportunities through a skills v competency matrix. Improvement programs are developed to assist both individual development and functional areas to improve performance for the business.

FACILITY

The entire warehouse is reviewed to get a more accurate understanding of what it takes to process inventory. We look at each of the functional zones that support receiving, cross dock, flow through, put-away, replenishment, picking, sortation, load consolidation and despatch. The entire layout is accessed through observation and simulation to understand the bottlenecks, delays and restrictions due to site constraints that limit speed to floor for each stage of the fulfillment process. MHE storage and movement areas are assessed along with all types of storage systems to understand efficiency, utilisation and effectiveness.

CAPABILITY

This is where we take a look at what your warehouse is able to achieve in a standardised shift pattern, does it need to operate longer to incur overtime. Are the facility constraints around the type of MHE used or the limitations with flow space, process or systems contributing to an inefficient and costly warehouse operation?

This is where 3D warehouse simulation provides the most positive contribution in identifying real performance barriers and allowing "What if" scenarios to slowly improve labour productivity, reduce order cycle time and increase speed to market. Our lean warehouse continuous improvement programs convert these opportunities and create a more responsive, right cost warehouse operation.


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Feel free to contact our office for advice or to discuss any specific project requirements.

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