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There are certain periods in the year when you know your warehouse will be busier than normal. For some warehouses, these can be the holiday periods like the run-up to Christmas. However, for some sectors, these busy periods may not coincide with the holiday seasons.
Preparing your warehouse and your goods lift for the rush that you might experience during these busy periods is essential. Not only will it help you to keep up with the increased workload more effectively, but it will also ensure that you do not compromise on the safety and well-being of your warehouse staff.
Let’s take a look at some of the things that you should be doing to prepare your warehouse for busy periods.
How to Prepare for Busy Periods in Warehouse?
Identifying your Busy Periods
Before you can truly plan for your busy periods and how you will handle them it is important to identify when those busy periods will take place. If they are not seasonal and linked to the holiday season, then this can be a little trickier.
Analysing previous sales will help you to identify your peak periods and also predict future demand. This will then help you when it comes to planning your staffing needs, inventory levels and everything else that you need to ensure maximum efficiency during your busy period.
Make Sure your Equipment is Reliable
The worst thing that could happen to you during a busy period is for some of your essential equipment to stop working properly.
This could reduce your productivity, resulting in delays and a poor customer experience. The knock-on effect of this could be customers who look to take their business elsewhere, particularly if the delays are lengthy.
In order to avoid this occurring it is important to keep up a good maintenance schedule on all of your equipment, including your goods lift.
This will help to make sure that everything is working as efficiently as possible at all times and it will also allow you to catch repairs even before they happen, ensuring consistency within your operations and no disruption.
Reinforce Good Lifting Practises
A goods lift is a highly effective way of getting goods from the floor where they are being stored to where they need to be for packing and dispatch. However, there may still need to be an element of manual lifting and moving involved.
During busy periods, your goods lift will be able to maximise your efficiency but if you are not lifting and loading properly then there is every chance of injury occurring. If this happens, your staff numbers will be reduced, making it harder to work to maximum efficiency.
Putting in a little work before the busy period and reinforcing those all-important good lifting practices should hopefully get you through with minimal, or better still no, injuries.
Rotate Stock
In the run-up to your busy period, take a look at figures and statistics for previous busy periods. This will help you to identify those items that are most likely to be flying out of your warehouse.
To make your operations as efficient as possible consider moving those items to locations that are closer to your goods lift. This will make your processing just a little bit faster, which will make coping with additional demand much easier
Conclusion
There are lots of things you can do in the run-up to busy periods to make life easier in your warehouse.
However, the most important thing that you can do is ensure that your goods lift has been serviced and is running smoothly. Do not underestimate just how important it will be when it comes to dealing with all that additional work.
