Many manufacturers are struggling to attract skilled employees.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall annual turnover rate for warehousing, transportation and utilities is a massive 53%. The labor market has improved since 2022, but keeping a warehouse fully staffed with employees who possess the skills to run it well is still an enormous and complex challenge, when more than half of a business’s employees leave every year.

One way to address this challenge is to reduce the number of employees needed to operate a warehouse. To this end, technologies such as autonomous robots and artificial intelligence can automate and optimize warehouse operations. But these are not the kinds of solutions one can rapidly deploy, and they require a significant capital investment. 

Manufacturers and distributors can, however, take advantage of their enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms — technology that they’re likely to already have in place — to improve efficiency and mitigate the damage of high turnover. Additional benefits include increased accuracy and on-time delivery.

Following are four immediate, low-cost measures that warehouse managers can take in the short term to increase efficiency.

Examine how the warehouse is laid out, and reorganize it to make it easier for pickers. One manufacturer that did this increased its usable pallet floor space by one-third. 

When thinking about warehouse layout, there are a number of best practices to follow:

• Get feedback from warehouse workers. Manufacturers should begin by talking to pickers and shelvers about how the layout could be improved. After all, they’re the ones on the front line, and they likely have some good ideas about how the floor could be rearranged to increase accuracy and waste less time.
• Clearly label all bins, aisles and rows with placards. Identify locations using a logical numbering and lettering system. It’s a simple change, but it can make a big difference in helping employees find the right bin faster. In fact, it works so well, many will find they don’t need to invest in a full-scale warehouse mapping solution.
• Have clearly defined, separate spaces for raw materials and finished products. When the COVID-19 pandemic threw supply chains into chaos, many distributors and manufacturers saw their warehouses filing up to the brim, so inventory just got stashed wherever they could make space. It’s well past time to clean up that mess. Misplaced goods and raw materials can cause serious problems in shipping and production.
• Take advantage of vertical space and mobile shelving units. Seasonal finished goods can be stored in temporary mobile units, while stackable containers can increase capacity without the need to add square footage.
• Organize a floor layout based on order-picking. Manufacturers should make sure that groupings are logical, and that the inventory that moves the fastest is the easiest to access. Do customers often order different products in a single order? If so, place those items as close to each other as possible.

Implement best practices to help pickers do their work faster and more accurately.

Manufacturers don’t need a warehouse management system to enable their pickers to pick by bin location. Simply sort packing slips according to the bin as soon as they’re printed, so sales orders come up in a logical order. Also, as much as possible, it helps to consolidate multiple orders into a single pick list, which will shorten how far pickers have to go to find items.

And if there is a WMS, enable suggested picks. In an industry like food, this can be particularly helpful to avoid spoilage and support a first-expire-first-out (FEFO) practice. 

Update your barcode scanners. Many companies are still scanning with mobile devices that are a decade old. They still work, and I’m sympathetic to an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy, but handheld devices have seen a lot of improvements in speed and throughput even in the last few years. Where an older handheld may take anywhere from 30 seconds to one minute to load a pick list, newer models can do so in just a couple of seconds. That might not seem like a lot of time, but saving 30 seconds per load, multiplied by 30 lines by 20 pickers across two shifts, produces 10 hours of time savings each day. It adds up fast.

What’s more, this analysis just takes device performance into account. Newer devices can support other time-saving capabilities such as lot and picking suggestions. It’s worth the investment.

Implement pallet tracking. If they operate a high-SKU, low-volume warehouse, operators aren’t fetching the same items repeatedly, so they find themselves wasting time performing a treasure hunt. An ERP platform can almost certainly provide real-time information on the locations of pallets, along with its status if the warehouse operator invests in radio frequency identification tags or internet-of-things sensors. With pallet tracking, pickers can find items faster and sales orders can be more efficiently staged. It’s also a powerful theft-prevention tool, because managers will know exactly when a pallet is removed. 

With focused and strong support from leadership, an average warehouse could implement all of these measures within a month or two, making a big difference in warehouse efficiency, worker productivity and picker accuracy. In fact, when the next few workers give notice, replacing them might not even be necessary.

Jamie Veinot is product manager of SYSPRO Americas.