Seasonality can have a tremendous impact on your entire supply chain, including your warehouse operations. It can affect what and when inventory items shift from slow-moving to fast-moving and vice versa. It can impact lead times from your suppliers to your distribution center and consequently move capacity requirements for in-house storage areas. It can also affect resource requirements for order picking, packing, assembly, and staging operations. There is little that goes on in a warehouse facility that seasonality does not influence, and therefore it should be a significant part of any warehouse layout optimization plan.
Engage Your Subject Matter Experts
To start, the plan for optimizing your warehouse for seasonal demand should consist of ideas from subject matter experts in each of the critical areas of the warehouse. Ideally, these experts will have experienced several seasonality cycles for your warehouse, business, and industry. They will have experienced your warehouse’s bottlenecks, stockouts, or overflow caused by seasonality. They should be your first resource for suggestions on how to improve your warehouse to handle these seasonal fluctuations. Their ideas can make up the backbone of your process improvement plan. And your subject matter experts can facilitate the early and rapid adoption of any process changes.
Understand Your Current State
You may first want to establish a baseline for your business’ performance through several cycles of seasonality. These metrics will inform you about the magnitude of any seasonal pain points so that you can focus on maximizing your investment in resources to improve the biggest drains on your warehousing operations during seasonal ebbs and flows.
Forecast And Demand Planning
Use your forecasting and demand planning tools to build excess storage space into your warehousing plan to account for high-demand periods. Your estimate of storage requirements should take into account supplier lead times, stockout costs, and inventory carrying costs. Optimize your warehousing estimates to minimize cost and to balance lead times with demand expectations.
Warehouse Design And Layout
Warehouse design and layout should be coupled with your picking strategy. And because a significant amount of time is spent picking products to fill orders, the plan for your warehouse should minimize the amount of unproductive time spent on order picking.
For smaller operations, discrete or batch picking may be optimal. Match these picking strategies with a U layout configuration to maximize a compact storage area. Receiving is at one end of the U and shipping is at the other end. Workers move between the two ends to pick, pack, and sort orders. This configuration is best for small fulfillment teams and warehouses with a few daily deliveries and shipments.
More extensive operations are unduly constrained by the U layout and are better served by a flow-through design with receiving on one side of the building and shipping on the other. All other warehouse operations are laid out between the two docking areas. Wave and zone picking are often utilized for this configuration when demand volume is high. Typically, for this design, floor plans are spacious, and storage requirements are substantial.
So, before implementing your warehouse layout optimization plan for seasonal changes, consider the combination of picking strategy and layout that will help to minimize errors, bottlenecks, and wasted time when fulfilling orders for shipment.
Outsourcing
On-demand warehousing may be the perfect solution for large, seasonal fluctuations in your business’ demand cycles. Outsourcing warehouse requirements during high-volume periods allow you to keep in-house resources stable while meeting extreme variations in order fulfillment. On-demand warehousing and third-party logistics companies provide temporary solutions to planned and unexpected increases in warehouse requirements. You can maintain constant internal staffing, equipment, and storage levels while outsourcing overflow requirements during peak fulfillment periods that exceed your in-house capabilities.
Whether you are looking to save space or to improve day-to-day throughput processes, the right racking storage system can shape your facility to its maximum potential. Contact the team at Complete Warehouse Supply for your initial chat to see what solution will work best for your warehouse needs.