3PL’s, who are cognizant of their customer prerequisite, can deliver on commitments of service excellence by separating themselves from rest and positioning ahead of the competition. Whether Ecommerce fulfilment is considered to be a minuscule element of warehousing business or the lynchpin for growth, it’s imperative to set the most effective and efficient warehouse picking and packing practices for accomplishing the supreme objective of increased productivity & higher customer satisfaction. Considering the aforementioned, we’ve consolidated a checklist of best practices to empower warehouse storage people, process, and technology for delivering excellence in customer expectations.
The People
- Integration of experienced and new workers to create opportunities within the team for learning and improving warehouse internal processes.
- Scheduling regular meetings to discuss worker feedback leading to innovations that can increase warehouse profitability and efficiency.
- Hiring an experienced supervisor, capable of managing & improving all aspects of the warehouse floor.
- Assigning sufficient authority to managers to accord approvals or procedural modification if and when needed.
- Regular training of personals.
The Processes
- A continuous observation about the time taken by pickers to find SKUs, negligence in some case can account between 40% – 50% additional picking hours.
- Abstaining from mixing of different SKUs within a similar area and allocating a specific pick location for each SKU to improve picking productivity.
- Utilizing varied picking strategies like zone picking, batch picking, or wave picking to improve picking efficiency.
- Appropriate set up of packaging station enabling staff to have quick and easy access to materials needed for packing SKUs.
- Observing and determining, if and why are the packers compelled to walk around for additional items on a regular basis.
- Providing pre-printed packing lists and receipts with correct and confirmed addresses.
- Ensuring materials to be shipped are marked clearly with confirmed addresses and printed receipts.
- Having custom kitting strategies in place for a better process, speed and efficiency.
The Technology
- Owning an efficient and robust “Warehouse Management System” capable of consolidating all orders from various sales channels and generating order wise location based pick-list that is well integrated with customers ERP.
Aaj Enterprises
