You may have found that business has been immensely slow to nearly non-existent over the course of the pandemic.
However, that is now changing, and it is important to be ahead of the game when business picks up, and the orders start flying in again, which they will do very soon.
Taking the time to make the most of being quiet is a very sensible thing to do, and here are three things that you could put at the top of your ‘to-do list.
1. Reorganize the Shop Floor
Take a good long look at how your shop floor is laid out and see if there are any areas where improvement to enhance workflow, growth, or storage can be obtained.
One of the main areas that can aid not only manufacturing speed but also can be advantageous when it comes to employee health and well-being is to look at installing conveyor belts. Conveyor belts placed around the production area of a factory floor can help with bringing work to and from employees so that they have a constant supply. As well as cutting out any walking around that your employees may have to do in their everyday roles.
There are many different types and styles available from conveyor companies to suit everyone’s tastes and requirements.
This can be beneficial in that there is less likely to be damage to your products, and it will also cut down on the risk of employees spraining themselves by carrying heavy objects or tripping and falling.
2. Enhance your Warehouse
By enhancing and upgrading areas of your warehouse, you can speed up your kitting processes, get on top of your stock rotation, keep track of your stock levels and organize your despatch areas, so that customer orders take less time to pick, pack and get out of the door.
In order to get the best out of your warehouse, it is important to have the correct software and hardware that can support your warehouse team’s needs within their computer system as well as giving them the opportunity to work productively by providing the correct tools such as forklifts, pallet trucks and maybe even invest in some AMRs to provide assistant to your warehouse employees.
3. Retrain your Employees
One of the most beneficial things you can do is take the time to retrain your employees. This will work especially well if you have had to enforce downtime within your business during the pandemic.
It will act as a refresher to all your employees, get their minds geared back into working, and if there is any additional training that you feel you would like to incorporate into their refresher time, then this is good, too.
When people have been doing a job for a long period of time, it is easy for bad habits to kick in and corners to be cut. It is also possible for those who have had long periods off of work to find that their concentration levels have dropped or that they cannot remember all of the stages within the tasks expected of them.
