Increasing Efficiency of Warehouse Management: A Case Study of Second Hand Shoes Warehouse

Abstract

The purposes of this research are 1) to reduce the time to find the products in the warehouse and 2) to increase the efficiency of product storage in warehouse. Experimental Research was applied in this study. Populations in the research were the staffs operating in warehouse section and the sample group used the 5 staffs of this section as a tool. Testing was performed by counting operating time for finding products before and after improvement.  By preliminary study, it was found that the major problems from unsorting of shoe types and no recording of shoes quantities in the warehouse resulting in products mixing confusingly. In order to solve the problems, the fishbone diagram was introduced, the results showed that 23.3% of the problems came from product finding. Then, the stock card method was applied to improve the process of finding and stocking products for monitoring type and quantities of the shoes. Furthermore, the activities based sorting and the fixed location system methods were adopted in the warehouse for sorting the shoes in appropriate and fixed locations. The best seller shoes were placed near the door for easily finding. The staffs were trained for the fixed location storage technique. After system improvement, the time for product finding was checked for comparing with before. The results showed that the average time for finding the shoes was reduce about 37.7% or 5.29 min/order. From this study, it is recommended that these methods should be applied for managing warehouse in the future.