At its most fundamental level, receiving is the process of confirming that you received what you ordered. Does the material received match your purchase order? Do you place it in your warehouse quickly?

When you consider that the average warehouse receives, counts, and inspects thousands of items of varying shapes and sizes from hundreds of vendors whose picking, packing, and shipping practices are all different, it is not surprising that receiving can be one of the most complicated functions and warehouse processes. Errors in receiving, unlike most other errors in your warehouse, have a ripple effect. If you can’t get your receiving process working smoothly, you’ll run into near-future scenarios where product will be sitting on your receiving dock, or on pallets in a corner. Your pickers will waste time looking for them.

If you think my emphasis on the importance of receiving smacks of hyperbole, consider this: data from your receiving department determines...

Kevin Collins

Overview
In the first chapter of our Best Practices series, we explored the many benefits of cycle counting. Chief among them is the elimination of an annual physical count of your inventory. While cycle counting is our preferred inventory counting process, many companies still conduct annual counts. Acknowledging that many companies still conduct annual counts, here is our look at the Best Practices for an annual physical inventory.

Benefits of Counting
Anyone who has ever planned or participated in an inventory count knows what a frustrating, tedious and time-consuming activity it can be. The actual process of counting requires you to remove employees from their regular jobs for hours, if not, days in every inventory location. Depending on your warehouse operation, this could effect shutdowns in other parts of your business such as manufacturing. While the frustration of counting every item, and hunting for items and material that are nowhere to be found...

Kevin Collins

In our recent Best Practices for Putaway chapter, we discussed how to efficiently move items from receipt to storage. Gazing at the inventory now stored throughout your warehouse, what are you going to do when an order comes in? With some industry estimates suggesting that order picking represents more than 60% of warehouse operating costs, few warehouse management decisions have as much effect on your profitability.

TIP: The average warehouse or distribution center will have many more shipments than receipts so if you have to choose, concentrate on picking optimization over receiving optimization.

In this chapter, we'll look at Best Practices for Order Picking. We'll look at various strategies, planning issues, and options you can investigate when planning your own picking design. (We'll also touch on technology options but only briefly. In the next chapter, we'll dive down in much greater detail into picking...

Kevin Collins

The merchandise has arrived in your warehouse. Receiving is going well with cartons and pallets leaving the trailers and entering your facility. What are you going to do now? Let’s discuss best practices for putaway and some of the processes you can implement to improve how you place received items in bins, cages or on shelves.

Putaway (as part of the material handling function) is the process that moves material from the receiving area to your storage, replenishment, or pick areas (or perhaps even straight into your manufacturing operation). Ideally, you’re managing your putaway space requirements by calculating resource and space requirements based on your estimated or expected receipts, as well as current backlogs. What do you think you are going to receive today, tomorrow, next month or next season?

In a perfect world, product is put away the same day it's received. If you are unable to reach this daily objective, you’re going to generate space and congestion...

Kevin Collins

In our previous chapter on Best Practices for Picking, we revealed the secret to great picking efficiency–the imperative to minimize walk time and product handling by your picking staff. Each unnecessary footstep taken by a picker reduces optimal efficiency, as do multiple touches of items. The simplest and easiest way to avoid these situations is to locate product by pick frequency.

OK, while this shouldn't be hard to understand, what picking system and which technologies increase the chances of picking efficiently?

There are three main picking systems, piece picking, case load picking and pallet picking. Some warehouses will be able to use just one, while others will find their greatest efficiency and performance levels by using two or more in combination. Next, we'll discuss which picking methods work best for each picking system. Finally, we'll look at a wide variety of technology and equipment choices, weighing their pros and cons for each picking system...

Kevin Collins