Johannesburg, 08 Feb 2022
Summary:
Large high-volume warehouses often face significant and unpredictable amounts of work to manage across work shifts and seasons. If it is not organised in a controlled manner, according to customer demands and, more importantly, to what the warehouse is able to process, the facility is doomed to fail if the warehouse is flooded with work, hoping that they survive. Wave capacities and controlled work assignment is a way of controlling this flood.
Objective:
- To stabilise the amount of picking tasks released per wave planning period.
- To increase the throughput of customer orders and decrease time between outbound order creation and outbound order completion. This will ensure pickers are busy with the right work at the right time in the warehouse.
Solution:
Analyse the previous month’s data to calculate the number of bin visits per hour versus the number of wave items released per hour. This will result in upper capacity of the pick rate. Assign the upper capacities to the wave capacity profiles in the wave time attributes.
Benefits:
- Decreased warehouse order creation to start time, leading to an increased throughput of work.
- Fewer open orders in the system, leading to quicker processing time from order placed to goods issued.
- Cleaner checking bays and loading areas.
- Successful turnaround time for replenishment, resulting in a decrease in pick exceptions.
Improvement stats:
With three months implementation of the capacity profiles:
Average creation to start time of warehouse orders decreased by 29% for flowrack picking, 25% decrease for case picking, and a 10% decrease in pallet picking, with an overall decrease of 14% in standard deviation:
Visual view of the decrease in warehouse order time from creation to start, for case picking. The cumulative frequency highlights that the number of warehouse tasks per warehouse order remained relatively similar.
Without capacity profiles:
After three months of capacity profiles:
For more information, reach us at info@argonscs.com.
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