Why Does Warehouse Material Handling Matter?

By Author: Kamtech
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Material handling directly impacts productivity in warehouses, manufacturing plants, and distribution centers. An inefficient facility causes errors and delays, eroding customer loyalty and making it easier for your competition to snatch away business.

Something else that’s interesting? Effective material handling isn’t only about sorting your goods into unit loads. Successful businesses invest time into monitoring and improving their material handling system in order to protect:

· The integrity of their goods

· The productivity of their retail warehouse,warehouse, distribution center, or manufacturing plant

· The physical and mental health of their workers

When a shipment arrives, a good material handling process ensures goods get from the dock to the appropriate rack in good time. It also accounts for proper control of materials. You can mitigate theft, damage, and spoilage with a material handling process that limits access to certain parts of your warehouse to particular employees.

Finally, proper material handling allows warehouses to store goods in ...
... an organized manner that makes it easy to pick and pack inventory for outgoing shipments.

Improve Your Employee Morale
Beyond inventory management, effective material handling can also increase employee morale. Well-designed systems and processes help employees complete work faster.

A poorly designed warehouse positions machinery with little to no regard for specific processes. Frustratingly, a machine used for Step 2 of production may be placed all the way on the other side of the warehouse.

Now your employee’s time on task is doubled. It can also result in workers to moving heavy loads over unnecessarily long distances.

What Role Does Warehouse Layout Play in Material Handling?
Your warehouse layout significantly influences your material handling system. It can be the difference between an efficient warehouse and a warehouse that can’t keep it together.

A poor warehouse layout causes bottlenecks, (moving more than necessary within the warehouse), and raises the risk of injury due to manual material handling.

A well-designed warehouse layout streamlines processes, decreases worker movements, and positively impacts employees’ physical and mental health.

Prioritize Flow, Accessibility, and Space in Warehouse Design
If you’re moving shop or opening up a new warehouse, you’re in the perfect position to start off right. Keep the following warehouse layout optimization tips in mind.

Flow Keeps Ops Moving

Does your design enable the uninterrupted flow of goods through your facility? Is machinery set next to the machines workers subsequently use in a given process? Are materials for each workstation nearby?

Optimize Accessibility to Increase Worker Speed

Are pallets stored in a way where workers can access goods without moving other goods out of the way? Are racks safety and readily accessible by forklifts and pallet jacks?

Use Space Efficiently

Have you accounted for all your warehouse needs, storage-related or otherwise such as offices and washrooms? Do you have space to store empty pallets or batteries?

By keeping flow, accessibility, and space at the forefront of your mind, you can design an effective warehouse layout.

Determine Your Warehouse Objectives
What processes do you want to prioritize in your warehouse? Your particular business may want to improve inventory management while another wants to implement cross-docking while another wishes to improve picking and packing. Once you’ve zeroed in on the goal you want to achieve, you can structure your warehouse thoughtfully.

What’s more, all of those example objectives support the larger objective of improving material handling.

Calculate How Much Inventory You’ll Store
An overloaded facility has a detrimental effect on material handling. Improperly stacked loads can topple causing injuries. Poorly stored goods require workers to move one product to gain access to another.

Understanding how much inventory you’ll store at a given time and how big the average item will be helps you make smart decisions about pallet rack height and aisle space.

Blog Credit :- jorgensonmaterialhandling.com

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