21 mistakes adding cost and killing productivity in your warehouse - #11

11.    Not separating fast pick areas and bulk storage

At the heart of all warehouse productivity improvement is the target of eliminating the waste of motion.  Simply moving something from one place to another in the warehouse does not add any value.  One of the most common mistakes we see in warehouses is the failure to optimise the placement of the most commonly picked items to reduce travel path when picking and replenishing.

What do you do when you have lots of stock of those fast moving products?  If you keep all your stock together it will take up so much space in your fast moving rack zone that your fast moving products will not be near each other.  

The solution to this problem is to create a pick location with just enough of each fast moving product to allow you to keep a lot of products in a restricted amount of space and keep the bulk quantities of the stock somewhere else in your warehouse.  This means you will need to periodically replenish the stock of each item in the fast from the bulk zone.  This process is known as pick area replenishment.

The configuration of your fast pick zone will depend upon your products and their physical size and order profile.  Ideally you want at least a day’s worth of stock in a pick face and more is better.  If the stock is batch controlled or expiry dated then you will want to have two pick faces to allow for different batches/dates.  You should avoid mixing batches/dates of product in the same location if batch control and traceability is important to your business (it may not be).

Replenishment of the pick face can be done on demand or to a schedule.  On demand means that you do not do any replenishment until you absolutely have to.  When you release a wave of orders the replenishment moves needed to fulfill them will also be generated.  The disadvantage of this is that it can slow down your order fulfillment as you cannot complete those orders waiting of the pick face to be replenished.

Scheduled replenishment means that you can use slower times of warehouse activity to perform replenishment so that your high activity times during order processing can be devoted to processing orders in the shortest possible time.  The best solution will depend on your particular cycles of activity for your business.

If you have a basic business system that only allows one location per item (there are still too many of these around) then how do you find the bulk stock if you have set the pick face to be the only location for the item?  There are two solutions to this problem:

1.    Keep the bulk stock nearby.  Usually on a level above or below that is not located on the system.

2.    In a manually recorded location with a paper trail to the pick face.  Keep a card in the pick face with a list of locations where the balance of the stock is held.  Cross off the locations when you empty each location during replenishment and write on new locations when you receive and put-away new stock.  Also note the quantity held by the pick face so that you can use these cards to drive the replenishment process when pick faces are empty.

Further productivity gains can also be made by making sure you store your bulk stock to minimise the travel required during replenishment.  Keep the bulk stock of the fastest moving products in the fastest to access bulk areas.  This is another example of product slotting technique which we will cover in more detail in #13.

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*WPI is our global initiative to raise world productivity by helping small to medium businesses develop amazingly brilliant warehouses. The WPI is essentially a place for learning how to improve your knowledge of warehouse operations improvement, sharing skills and ideas and helping other warehouse professionals  (coming soon!).