Your warehouse is a limited resource environment. You have a finite amount of people, equipment, products and available storage space. Slotting will help you make the most of the cubic space you have.

At its most basic level, slotting is the series of tasks that precede the decision of where to put away inventory based on space available within your warehouse facility. Who benefits from better slotting? Any organization that needs to improve resource management, increase shipping performance, respond to seasonal variances in product shipping, or optimize a limited number of pick faces. Good slotting practices are a prerequisite for optimal picking. You’ll optimize space utilization and minimize the time and effort required to efficiently receive and store incoming products.


Slotting Benefits
When you optimize the storage of goods in your warehouse through slotting and reslotting, you’ll increase productivity and greater facility throughput....

Kevin Collins

Is inventory accuracy a possibility or an oxymoron?

If you can’t find the numbers of parts, finished goods or product your inventory system says you have, you’re undoubtedly wasting time looking for them, holding excess “just in case” inventory (and thus raising your inventory carrying costs), delaying customer orders, wasting time in production and order fulfillment, or generating unnecessary return processing costs.

The main reasons for the difference between what your Warehouse Management System (WMS) system thinks is in your warehouse and what you discover is actually on-hand are unrecorded or inaccurately recorded inventory transactions. A box of inventory placed on the wrong shelf. Forty pounds of steel fittings sent to manufacturing that were actually recorded as four pounds. A size 4 skirt whose packaging is incorrectly labeled as size 6 generates a return because the customer discovered it to be too small. When the product is returned into inventory,...

Kevin Collins

You already knew after reading the Best Practice Series for Inventory and Warehouse Management introduction that implementing a Warehouse Management System (WMS) was inevitable.

You might have already implemented one. You might even be currently editing a WMS Request for Proposal as a first step. Or, your eyes might be closed shut, hoping that WMS vendors stop calling you, and Modern Materials Handling writers stop writing glowing WMS case studies. Sorry, you can’t ignore their ample benefits any longer. You really need a WMS to implement your industry’s best practices. But what type?

To SaaS or not to SaaS
We’re going to start our WMS conversation from the perspective of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vs. on-premise software. It is vital to understand their similarities and differences. The applications loaded on your laptop or desktop are examples of on-premise software. A common example is Microsoft Office. QuickBooks hosted on your network server...

Kevin Collins

Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein are two giants of history who knew a thing about getting things done right. The observation that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again with the expectation of different results” is attributed to both of them.

Does their observation characterize your inventory and warehouse operations?

If your operation is one of the tens of thousands of warehouses in the United States still using paper, Microsoft Excel, or processes first developed in the late 70s/early 80s, we’re here to help. To provide you tools, information, guidance, tips, proven methodologies, we offer you the forthcoming “Best Practice Series for Inventory and Warehouse Management.”

SmartTurn created this series for business owners, accounting staff, procurement managers responsible for inventory or warehouse operations, and anyone else who wants to demystify warehouse planning and operations. As a complement to the series, we’re...

Kevin Collins