Create the Perfect Invoice Layout for Logistics with airSlate SignNow

Invoice layout for Logistics

So this week I'd like to share with you ten principles of warehouse design and operations proven principles they're going to help you be much more efficient in your warehousing but I'm not a warehouse expert so what I've managed to do is to film one of our warehouse experts at a recent seminar let's get over and have a look so we're talking about warehousing and indeed as Rob says we're sort of specialists in warehouse you know I don't think I necessarily set out to do that but over the time that I've been with with Logistics Bureau I've just done more and more and more and I've really during that time appreciated that distribution center design operation flow management everything there's a real science behind it and so I've really delved deeper into that and found it absolutely fascinating so I'm going to be sharing with you today some aspects of what I found over the time that I've been with logistics Bureau okay so we have a number of things that we're going to talk about our ten principles for best warehouse design and operation the first one and I'm very important when we're thinking about the current operation or in indeed a new distribution center it's important that we look at minimal touches of the goods and this is aligned to sort of lean management principles okay so we want to get close to zero handling of the products that we've as we're taking them through the warehouse in automated warehouses you can get down to zero but most warehouses are probably around about seven or eight handling you know seven or eight times that people actually pick something up and put it down including on a pork truck and so forth as a general rule of thumb if yours is around three or four that's not too bad okay if you an automated warehouse and get the zero but if three to four if you're not automated you're going okay so there's a couple of tips for you okay the next thing which is really important one way flow and and also we've got to watch not only one way flow during the warehouse but also vehicles around a warehouse so why is one way flow important it's a really good principle to apply during the design process because that way you can plan your picking path through the warehouse you're sort of a replenishment paths and so on it's not always achievable that's why I say it's a general principle but if I start working on a warehouse design I'll be thinking the first one minimal touches is the good and second one-way flow and that really helps us develop our our warehouse should run in terms of vehicles in Australia we run trucks generally in a clockwise direction around the warehouse and what do you want to have any idea why that would be sorry ah beautiful yes so that the driver can reverse on the right side if they have to back into a a dock okay but in the USA it's the other way around isn't it's counterclockwise so never employ an American logistics expert to design your warehouse so but yeah very important principles the next thing I'm going to shoot through these fairly quickly because we've only got 20 minutes or so we have to make sure that stock is in the right place and for this we look at a process of product slotting and I'll be having a look at that in a moment but I might introduce you to a concept the concept of triadic warehouse the triadic warehouse there's two types of warehouse a triadic and an entree edit I told her this is a little bit of science to you okay I don't add as you with science but a triadic warehouse is basically broken up into zones very simple fast moving product medium moving profit product and slow product in a warehouse that's organized that way we call triadic okay a warehouse that has no zones would be non triadic now the interesting thing is about that is that we may have both triadic and non triatic in the same warehouse because with these days we're getting see lots more automation and if you have an automated part of your warehouse the system that's operating that it doesn't you don't need to know where the stock is but the the crane or the or the automatic storage and retrieval system it does and it will go and get the stock so they could be part of your warehouse where that applies but the other part that's operated manually we should be doing that so correct placement of stock is critical okay and the right amount of stock this is about inventory control it's about you know and Rob's just been talking about benchmarks and so forth but it's about having the right amount of stock or the demand that's happening through your warehouse now sometimes customers make the mistake of measuring the stock by the sales value betters what decisions we know better we have to look at the movement of that product because that drives the physical process is in the warehouse so just be careful of that that sometimes people say are there's not we don't need to worry about that it's a very low cost well you know very low sales revenue but if we have a big logistics process behind picking that stuff we do need to worry about it so it's important to look at sales but also the volume of the goods that are actually moving as well that make sense yeah and I'll come back to that one in a minute efficient labor this is critical and I've got a little model which I'll show you in a minute as well well as we'll say about labor is as Rob said before we have to make we have to optimize the labor that we've got and we do that by looking at the hours that we're putting into the distribution center and measuring what the output is so I'm going to show you a measure of output efficiency in a few moments benchmarking Rob's mentioned that one as well and I've got another slide that I'll show you in a couple of minutes okay this one selecting the materials handling system and I've done a little drawing on the board I haven't got too much time so I'm just going to show you this 2 by 2 matrix we're consultants so we like these matrixes um okay this is you see the two two squares were two squares on this axis we have volume row - hi and then on this axis we have the number of SKUs or the stock keeping unit that we're keeping in the organization and that's also from loads of high now in this day and age we're seeing lots of what we call skewed proliferation companies are increasing the range of products that you're holding and it's a real battle because every time you increase the number of SKUs that you've got you've got much more multiple logistics operations that are happening in the warehouse so there's a relationship between that and at the same time you've got as volume increases we have to deal with that okay long story short if you've got a low number of SKUs and low volume you're gonna have a very simple materials handling system it's going to be very basic you might just have some wrapping in a porter yeah that's it but as the volume increases you may start to introduce a medium level of mechanization and as your SKUs increase you may start to look at a low level of meter make mechanization even if your volume is still still the same sometimes companies their volume stays the same but the SKUs increase and that's where you have to consider how to handle that you know in the old days we do a lot of work with breweries and so forth so forth you go into a pub and you would have five beers on tap in a pub and it talking about like it's been years ago but now when you go into a pub how many of it but we'll be 25 and there's probably about another 50 friends in the in the cabinet behind the bar so that's a very good example of SKUs proliferation but the volumes have an increased that much in the drinking in fact more people drinking wines and spirits than perhaps what they have in the pot okay let's go to this one when we have very high volume and a high number of SKUs then we may look at a high mechanized system and what you find is that you know over time you might be moving this way or you might be moving that way or you could be doing that well how do you know how do you know where you are what we have to do is do some analysis to work out where you are and then we choose the materials handling system to suit okay so that's how you start to justify what type of materials handling system that would use you use in your distribution centers okay and I'll just touched on this we need to know our data and this is where we we look at all of the transactional value data and information that's coming in what we're receiving what we're picking and packing and dispatching what we're receiving in terms of returns either value-adding activities I'm gonna give you a tip now tell your secret never design your warehouse on averages okay if you do I will find you but you apply some statistics because if you design for every day's guess what you're gonna be right half the time but wrong the other half so we've really got to look at those peaks and the troughs and that's where statistics come in so we use some mathematics there to work that through so that we get things right okay so never design on averages they'd be noted that down and warehouse management software Rob mentioned this but it's very important that you have a management system particularly as the complexity rises you know in an operation you need a warehouse management system to help with the daily tasks that a distribution center has to operate you can spend a lot of money on a warehouse management system but there were also some quite well priced systems that are not overly expensive and these days those systems support all types of radio frequency picking and also what they call voice picking which is where the picker wears a headset like this hands-free and they can pick compact stock as they're working so some of those technologies are really valuable this one is critically important if we're into a warehousing development project or just improving our current operations we have to consult widely long gone are the days we just have two or three people sitting in a room you know when I'm working with a company I'll go and talk to the fourth truck driver the receptionist the managing director the suppliers even and just to find out what's going on and what are the requirements for that particular warehouse people are unloading containers at a dock because often they'll tell you about the dynamics that they have to deal with on a day today in an alley our to our bases and then we would also need to consult with architects engineers and environmental people and so on so it's important to consult widely totally we've got all of those inputs and sometimes we may receive an input from somebody and it may not be quite reading into what we want that's okay we'll just forget what they've said we've taken it on board we've heard it but we may not do exactly what they've said but at least everyone gets to have a bit of a say so that's really important so we consult widely doing the process okay now just on I'm just going to give you a couple of tips on design there's three methods of laying out a warehouse this one is the u-shaped design where you're receiving and you're dispatching out this way this is a triadic warehouse see how it's owned okay fast medium slow beautiful the benefit of that design is that it has the docks at one end of the building and is the most economical from a land-use perspective okay but then there's this one which is an eye shape design this one is receiving it one end obviously over there and dispatch over here this uses up more land because you have to have hard stand at one end and hard stand at the other but what it is good for is high volume flow because you can get a lot of volume coming through here and you're separating the receiving in the despatch functions then there's this one which is an l-shaped design this is where you have receiving in and really good for cross docking where we're bringing stock in and then we're sending it out fairly soon after we may never even put it into the racking we're bring it in and we're dispatching it so with the l-shaped design now the interesting thing is that in some cases we may have two of those designs in the one house or even in one warehouse or even three and I've done that particularly in in Asia and that might be the case where you're dealing with bulk goods coming in to a warehouse going out to evolve customer if you have a wholesale network you're bringing stocking in at one end you need to cross docket and send it out to a whole bunch of stores and if it's a retailer network you'll be bringing it in putting it away and then picking and packing it and then to distribute it into into small bands that are going around the city making deliveries so we might actually employ all three of those in the one warehouse so but it's good to know that because the design and the requirement will will work out what type of shape the warehouse will be in terms of that Rob mentioned I've just been to guitar working on a project retail chain over there they've done all of these layouts and I looked at them as I just didn't stack up and they said to me which is the best one and I drew that and a combination of a flow-through on the board one warehouse for the shop and they said got it so the architects scrambling off doing some preparatory drawings and I'd only been there for you know five days but sometimes if you use an architect they may not necessarily understand all of those dynamics and requirements of logistics so that's where we're quite often called in to sort of give some preparatory work along the way so the architects can do their job okay I mentioned a few minutes ago and slotting this is a very important part of your process if you correctly slot product into those zones and you'll you have a triadic warehouse then you can potentially achieve twenty to thirty percent saving in operating labor so if you have product in the wrong slot then you might find that you have long travel distances your repertory control is not there you're not rotating your stock so it's really important to swap the product correctly start ing to the volume and in the movement that's going through the warehouse but then once you've done that to revisit it maybe once or twice a year there's our recommendation and there's some really good software that is available to do that and you just feed in the transactions and and the software you know I can relay out the warehouse and you just then once you know what the real layout is you just spend some time moving stuff around and you can save ya maybe 20 or 30 percent the labor cost okay efficient labor I call it the overtime bug many companies suffer from this so why do people work overtime because they can a few extra bucks I've got five minutes thank you a few extra bucks in their pocket but if it's your warehouse and your staff for working overtime and you're paying it that's not good is it so what we try to do is yeah you know just work out what is how how efficient is our labor and what we need to do is look at our normal hours work versus overtime we look at the lines peak per day and the number of cartons each's or pallets pick the period and I have to suggest that we use this formula here which is water lines picked for labor hour so if you want to know what you're doing just look at the order lines pick the labor hour per day or per week or per month if you like but compare that from period to period because if you're if your order lines peak per hour is low but you're working a lot of overtime you need to say what's going on what are they doing no one's working during the day they all work after five o'clock okay so just be aware that it's quite a useful measure some companies even tie incentives to that so when employees aren't getting overtime means they're not getting enough money so maybe you sometimes just have to adjust the enterprise aggrievement and and you know put an incentive in so that when they do their or they work in the number of hours they get a little bonus at the end of the week yeah so any of something to think about and as I said before you can really you can save up to about 32 percent of your labor costs by by doing that okay so the other thing is the warehouse management software we've already mentioned that there's lots of aspects to that in terms of design the inventory tracking the receiving shipping there's all of these modules that you you know are available in those and if you get those working correctly then a warehouse management system is an invaluable piece of software for your company our product bench mark metrics what we do I think in Stevens session you may have covered some of this but we look at what what is in parity with the market we have you know maybe five or six factors that I would normally recommend that you look at in warehousing dispatch lines peak per hour if you just mentioned lines picked for direct hours lines per total DC hours total DC hours per million in terms of DC costs and DC cost per total labor use and we can develop a factor there so it's useful to have those so that you can gauge how you're performing and I could probably give you another six or seven more I don't recommend that companies have any more than six actually sometimes yeah there's only five there that's about right stuff that you know will help you manage your warehouse to to be any more efficient so it's really important that if you don't have any benchmarks that you do put them in place and with these if you've got multiple facilities then you can actually compare the efficiency of each facility as well so that's really helpful okay finally distinct terms of perfect warehouse design there's a number of factors he and I just want to share those with you and I think we'll will end we have three aspects to it we have the layout which I've already given you some insight into the process and the technology in the layout we're looking at the storage volume and that's report you know critical thing so we need to get that right right from the start or if it's an existing warehouse sometimes we need to go back and check it because of that scoop alliteration thing and the volume increases and so on then there's the process you know it's inbound and its outbound a warehouse is just a box it's a box to be a buffer between supply and demand that's all it is but we need to manage the inbound stocks and the outbound stocks effectively so that we get that happening efficiently and then there's a technology what is the storage media what level of automation do we need to put in and we need to get that right if we're able to balance all of those then we have every opportunity of actually getting the perfect warehouse design and then it's a matter of optimizing that in there on okay that's my 20 minutes thank you very much for listening and I'll hand back to Rob so thank you Mal Walker for sharing your tips maybe I have to give you more than 20 minutes next time now do remember if you have any topics that you'd like us to cover on this channel do comment below and if any tips that you found in warehousing add those in that's going to help people who are watching if you liked it of course hit the like button it's really good to know which topics people like or don't like so please do that and lastly subscribe if you're not already subscribed to this channel there should be a little red button just down there hit the subscribe button and that way you'll be notified of all of our wit videos that come out every week on a Wednesday so thanks for your time thank you for watching hope you got some great tips from Mal