If you have a large volume of dispatch orders to for fill it is often simple to create the products or picks to meet the orders but can be more challenging to control the logistical challenge of dispatching multiple or small orders from your dispatch area.
We have a wide variety of solutions to speed up the various potential bottlenecks in the dispatch process.
Starting at the beginning we can offer various options to fast pick pallets from pushback pallet racking to shuttle systems which increase pallet pick rates. If you have smaller items to dispatch to individual retailers stores you may benefit from gravity feed picking system these can also be tiered so you can have ground and first or even second floors.
This has the added advantage of keeping pickers away from forklift trucks and keeping all your dispatch area in the smallest footprint while maximising picking rates. These systems can also be easily integrated with barcode and computer controlled inventory systems with the advantages of better accuracy and increased picking and dispatch speed.
Once the product has been picked and is ready for dispatch the next process if often the area that is most overlooked and is often an area where many improvements can be made.
Depending on product types and volumes often a driven or gravity conveyor system can be the most effecting solution. These can be less expensive than you may realise and allow for a buffer between picking and final dispatch. They also offer the possibility of adding auto taping and auto labelling machines again speeding up dispatch rates and accuracy.
It can be the case that once these various orders are finished that they need to be grouped together in regions and re-palletised ready to be collected by wagons.
Again there is an opportunity to improve and speed up this process usually with the use of push back racking. The pallets can be placed in the push back racking by region in lanes and levels. This allows certain areas of the push back pallet racking to be loaded ready for a certain wagon destined for a certain region.
This is a good solution if the bottleneck you have is wagons picking up products, when a wagon arrives it is simply a case of a single forklift truck operator loading from the appropriate lanes and levels. The obvious advantage of push back is that by the time one pallet has been loaded the next pallet is presented at the front of the racking ready to be picked and loaded. This can mean that wagon loading times are dramatically reduced and the floor space required for the dispatch racking is dramatically reduced.
If you have a project and would like further advice contact one of our project managers on 01937 585 057 who can help you discuss the options to make your dispatch team faster and more profitable.
Why not take a look at our Case Studies page so see some recent projects carried out by 2H Storage solutions.