It’s one expensive game of hide and seek: An employee goes to the warehouse to pick an item to fill and order … and it’s not where it belongs.
The longer the search goes on, the more money it costs your company in wasted time and resources.
Decrease your tracking time and inventory costs go down with them. Here’s the solution one company came up with to increase their inventory accuracy and save money:
Where was it and why?
They started keeping track of which specific items they couldn’t find — what wasn’t where it was supposed to be when it came time for retrieval. Then they determined what was behind the confusion.
There wasn’t anything nefarious at work. Most of the time it was something as innocent as another worker moving a given item out of the way to pick something else, then never returning the original one to its proper spot on the warehouse shelves.
Patterns reveal the solutions
With those “cannot find” reports, patterns of problems will jump out for you. They absolutely did for this company. That was the key to making changes, whether it meant new pick procedures or even simply posting signs on the warehouse door that read “Did you remember to put everything back where you found it?”
Those are the steps that has their inventory accuracy way up and their costs down as a result.
