5 Proven Methods to Reduce Warehouse Expenses

Warehouse operations costs represent 58% - 64% of total expenses. There is a big swing here, 6%, if you are a $50MM dollar distributor with total expenses of $4MM dollars, then 6% is $240,000 from good to bad. It's definitely worth the effort.

1. Backbone - Get a solid radio frequency (RF) backbone and stop spending time on it. More time is wasted on network issues because of poor installation. Once your warehouse is running on RF for in bound and RF Voice for out bound everything in the warehouse is tied to it. A bad RF platform not only wastes your IT staffs time, but every minute your operators can't work is money off the bottom line. Get professionals, who if there is a problem can spend their time fixing it, not yours.

4. Productivity Tracking - Know what your staff is doing. Everything must be visible, if it is visible you can fix it. Track how many put aways are completed by the hour, and who does them. Know how much time is spent on breaks and indirect time.

2. Date tracking - Stop loosing money on out of date or lost product. Find out at receiving if the product does not meet your requirements, and make sure all items are set to your requirements, every facility is different. You must be able to control all the different types of dating; expiration dates, manufacture dates, use by dates, customer days to sell, distributor days to sell, everything must be included. Then make sure you can easily locate track the product in the facility. You need to be able to find it, confirm when it leaves the slot and keep the dates with it.

5. Pallet Loading - Over the years there have been many attempts to be creative and automate the selection process. The reality in the past and still today is that the most efficient and cost effective way to select in a Foodservice warehouse is to utilize a highly trained and motivated selector supported by a great WMS with Voice, driving a double pallet jack, making a single pass through a correctly slotted warehouse and driving it directly onto the truck.

3. Slotting and warehouse layout - More time is wasted traveling to and fro because of a bad layout and it costs you every day. If you don't have anyone in house that can review your layout, get some outside help. Get a good solid layout, then review it often to help with individual items. Everyone has warehouse layout problems, but minimize the daily effect of those problems.