Operion Group
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    Warehouse

    Lean warehouse: less waste, more flow

    Lean means working without losing time, movement or material. Here you read what that means in a warehouse, in plain language, and how you begin with small steps.

    Explained

    Lean in plain language

    Lean is a way of working in which you leave out everything that does not make things better for the customer. A customer pays for the right item at the right moment. What does not contribute to that, such as waiting, searching or double work, costs you money without anyone getting anything for it.

    In a warehouse that is easy to see. An employee who spends ten minutes looking for an item is working hard but improving nothing. A lean warehouse takes such work away, without people having to work faster. The gain lies in a better place, a better route and a better agreement.

    Lean is not a project with an end date. It is a habit: looking at what goes wrong and solving it in small pieces. That fits an SME warehouse, where nobody has time for a large programme.

    Recognising

    Eight kinds of waste in the warehouse

    In lean, everything that costs time or money without adding value is called waste. There are eight fixed kinds, and you recognise all of them in a warehouse:

    • Waiting

      Employees wait for a forklift, a missing item or a decision.

    • Walking and moving

      Too many steps, bending or reaching, because items are far away or in an awkward place.

    • Transport

      Goods that are moved unnecessarily, for example from receiving to an intermediate place and only then to storage.

    • Too much stock

      More items on the shelf than needed, so space and money are tied up.

    • Errors

      A wrong item or quantity in a box, followed by a return.

    • Double work

      Entering the same data twice or checking the same order twice.

    • Too many handlings

      Steps that add nothing, such as unpacking an item first and then packing it again.

    • Unused knowledge

      Employees know where it goes wrong, but nobody asks them.

    Order

    5S: a place for everything

    A workplace where everything is in its place is quicker to find your way in and calmer to work in. The best-known way to organise that is 5S. It is five steps, each starting with an S in the Japanese original, which we give here in English:

    • Sort

      Remove what you do not use. What remains is what you need.

    • Set in order

      Give everything a fixed place, close to where you use it, and mark that place.

    • Shine

      Keep the workplace clean. While cleaning you also see what breaks or is missing.

    • Standardise

      Agree how it should be, so that everyone does it in the same way.

    • Sustain

      Make it a habit, with a short check that belongs to the work.

    Flow

    Let the work flow

    The aim of lean is that work keeps moving without stopping. An order comes in, is collected, packed and dispatched, without lying around anywhere. Such a calm, uninterrupted movement is called flow. Anyone who wants flow looks at the places where work piles up: those are the bottlenecks.

    To find those places, we draw the whole stream on paper, from receiving to dispatch. That method is called value stream mapping. It gives a shared picture your team can talk about, instead of an opinion.

    Starting

    Starting small works best

    A good start is one zone and one problem. Choose, for example, the place where orders are packed, mark the place of each tool and see what changes in the first period. Let the employees who work there think along. They know best where the time goes.

    Make improvements visible. A board with what has changed and what is still open gives the team the feeling that things are moving forward. A short meeting at the start of the shift helps to hold on to agreements.

    Examples

    Three small improvements to begin with

    You do not need to start a large programme. These three improvements cost little and show quickly:

    • A place of its own for every tool

      A board or foam insert on which the place of each tape dispenser, pair of scissors and scanner is marked shows straight away what is missing.

    • Marked walking routes

      Lines on the floor for aisles, pedestrians and vehicles, so that everyone follows the same route.

    • A fixed place for what does not belong in its place yet

      A marked zone for returns, damaged goods and items waiting for a decision, so that they do not run through the rest of the flow.

    Measuring

    See whether it helps

    Lean only works when you see whether it helps. Choose one simple measure per improvement, for example the number of times someone has to search or the number of orders with an error, and keep it on a board.

    Do not wait for a perfect measurement. A simple count is enough to see whether the change works, and to show the team that the effort pays off.

    Service

    How we approach it

    Lean is part of our warehouse scan and of the redesign. In the scan we show where the biggest waste sits. In a redesign we work out the solution. Also read about improving warehouse processes and about designing a warehouse.

    More about working with a system that supports the warehouse is at warehouse management explained from BizBloqs.

    Read on

    More about warehouse optimisation

    Terms for this topic

    5SWaste (muda)FlowValue stream mapping

    Explained at BizBloqs

    What a system does and how you manage stock, BizBloqs explains itself:

    Part of our warehouse services

    Lean working in the warehouse is part of our warehouse services. We agree the scope and the price with you in advance.

    View the warehouse services

    Working lean in your warehouse?

    Tell us where your team loses time. We will tell you how a scan or redesign makes that visible and what the fixed price is.