Effective Tips for Maximising Warehouse Accessibility

Nevertheless, actually coming up with viable ways and means by which efficiency can be increased tends to be easier said than done.

Generally speaking, one of the best starting points can be to focus on accessibility. The reason being that the easier and faster it is to access anything that is required in your warehouse, the more efficiently it will run at all times.  By contrast, a warehouse with poor accessibility is largely guaranteed to be a warehouse that runs inefficiently.

So for those looking to enhance and improve warehouse accessibility for the sake of boosting efficiency in general, here’s a quick rundown of a few tried and tested tips from the experts:

Ensure Your Receiving Area Is Big Enough

First of all, efficiency in your warehouse means ensuring that staff members are provided with as much room as necessary to deal with the items both going into and leaving the warehouse. What tends to happen if there is not a large enough receiving area is that things end up in something of a bottleneck, slowing everything down and hampering efficiency. Think carefully not only about the storage of your items, but the available space in which to process and handle them.

Use Vertical Space

It’s a point we’ve raised many times and one that is always worth reiterating.  The more you focus on vertical space in your warehouse, the less it will be necessary to use and overuse available floor space. One of the very best ways of maximising space in a warehouse is to think about vertical storage solutions, which can clear up plenty of floor space and make it much easier and more convenient to store and retrieve items. It’s very difficult to run an efficient warehouse where there is very little floor space available.

Keep Aisles as Open as Possible

In the same way that you need a sufficiently sized receiving area, you also need to think carefully about how much space is available in terms of aisles. The wider, clearer and more open your aisles are, the easier it will be to get the job done across the board. And once again, one effective way of increasing the aisle space is to think more about using vertical space for storing your merchandise.

Give Items a Permanent Home

In so many instances, merchandise within a warehouse has a tendency of continually moving from one place to another for no good reason. This does absolutely nothing to aid accessibility or efficiency, ultimately resulting in things becoming complicated and convoluted. By contrast, ensuring that all items within the warehouse have a permanent home and sticking to it as much as possible can help make things much more convenient.

Replace Stairs with Ramps

Last but not least, in any instance where it is possible to do so it is definitely worth considering the option of replacing stairs with ramps. The reason being that this immediately opens up the access for any lifting equipment or vehicles you may have, while at the same time reducing travel time and potential complications for employees. Ramps can also make a real difference to overall warehouse health and safety, as a bonus.