How LEAN Manufacturing Can Help Your Warehouse Waste

One of the hardest things for a warehouse to achieve is efficiency. Controlling costs is important when you work to a budget, and maintaining efficiency is important if you want to uphold health and safety standards and keep your staff safe. A warehouse is a huge place to be, and one of the biggest problems that most warehouse management deals with is wastage. It’s not just waste in terms of leftover products, but wasted time between processes, wasted money on equipment that doesn’t work and then it’s the packaging on top of that!

LEAN principles are characterized by waste reduction due to effective management. The tips for optimising warehouse waste management come with ensuring that your actual waste is handled effectively, but LEAN principles cover the rest. You can get all of your team members properly engaged and working together to make your warehouse as efficient as possible, and when this happens, you can bet that waste management is under control. Every operation in your business can benefit from LEAN principles, and below, we’ve put together four very common ways that you can decrease your warehouse waste with it.

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• Excess Inventory & Over-Production Waste. When you choose to implement LEAN principles into your warehouse, you will see that any inventory that isn’t required to fulfil customer orders is going to be a waste to your business. Consistently looking at a comparison between your existing inventory and your sales data will help you to decrease excess inventory that just goes to waste.
• Reduced Labor Costs. When you don’t have an overproduction of inventory, you can reduce the motion of your labor. People are no longer unnecessarily moving from place toplace in the business, and effective project planning can also work to reduce these costs, too.
• Transportation Waste Decreases. Your warehouse is going to thrive when you reduce your waste through transportation. The processes for transportation are often a huge source of waste for your business, and if you reroute your deliveries, you’re going to be able to choose more direct and time-efficient routes that take away time wastage. Align your processes for transport with what you hope to offer your customers, and you’re going to have a much better time of reducing waste.
• Less Over-Processing Means Less Waste. Processes should always be analyzed and tracked. When they’re not, you risk over-processing waste. The right processes will reduce this and when you pay attention to whether your current processes are working, you can close your gaps and refine the way that you do things.

Operating efficiently is a must in your warehouse environment. Without efficiency, there’s no order and this is definitely something you need to ensure is in place! Your business could benefit massively from a reduction in waste, and LEAN manufacturing principles are going to give you time to evaluate your operations and yoru costs properly. You have to work to improve every process in your warehouse, and in return you get an efficient and motivated staff and a successful business.