Introduction
Warehouse management remains a vital concept in the supply chain, as it controls the movement and storage of properties within a firm. The process of receiving, storing, picking, packing, and shipping requires competent employees who comprehend their job expectations. Each division of warehouse operation has unique challenges requiring experienced and organized workforce to manage and improve (Weil par. 2). Natural gas, coal, natural gas liquids, and crude oil require effective management while in the petrochemical warehouses in order to ensure successful delivery to their destined locations. Effective warehouse management ensures smooth flow of raw materials by helping to optimize the supply chain, as well as accelerating time-to-market, realizing new cost efficiencies, and ensuring supply chain integrity.
Objective of the Essay
The objective of the essay is to discuss how to manage and improve warehouse operations. Besides, the discourse elaborates on the key tips that logistical departments can employ to improve the warehouse productivity. Therefore, improving and managing a warehouse, as well as tips of enhancing the productivity of a warehouse form the key objectives of the essay.
As a strongest asset in the petrochemical industry, warehouse management requires reliability, accountability, and dedication in order to offer integrated logistics of exceptional product quality, quantity, and timely delivery. Petrochemical companies in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Nigeria, Western Europe, and Japan have to work towards improving their service-provision to record high returns on investment. In this line, most petrochemical companies outsource warehouse management services from key logistical companies like CWT Limited and CARCABA GROUP in order to cut on cost and ensure perfect service delivery, thus enhancing customer satisfaction and sustainable development (Belcher par. 4).
In managing warehouses, managers must ensure that employees abide by safety regulations and guidelines. At the same time, a warehouse manager has to carry out invoice evaluation, coordination of deliveries, storage organization, and planning of employees schedules to ensure effective management. With numerous petrochemical products, managing such a warehouse is mentally taxing, thus requiring collective approach to meet the daily targets. Well-organized stocks, as well as priorities improve the efficiency of a warehouse, thus reducing costs of management and ensuring premium services to customers.
In petrochemical companies, there is need to increase efficiency in bin location management to eliminate physical movements around the warehouse to fill the orders. Using the software in managing bins, or locations, in a warehouse increases the overall efficiency of the system (Weil par. 7). In this aspect, those filling the orders tend to have natural progression in the entre warehouse operation, hence saving time from their efficient services.
There is need to confirm the contents of each item to ascertain whether they matches the description on the sales order since delivering incorrect quantities to customers may result in tremendous losses. Further, a petrochemical company may suffer intangible cost by losing touch with customers. From this analysis on the essence of a proper validation system, companies ought not to overlook this system when implementing a good warehouse management system in their operations.
Warehouse managers in the petrochemical companies have to use a warehouse management system that has the capability to reward the firms with high returns on investment (ROI) (Belcher par. 6). Additionally, effective warehouse management should aim at enhancing service provision to its clients and strengthening a company’s link with its clients by having less shipping and packing errors. A system that is able to document stuffs in a given box helps in validating shipment contents with the content of the required sales. Better customer service is essential in making follow ups in case of split up in shipment. Managers have to ensure that the inventory is kept flowing in order to deliver right products of accurate quantity to customers in good conditions.
Notably, in the entire process of warehouse management, efficiency and cost effectiveness form the core aspects of running the operations of a warehouse. The entire management process starts with proper organization of inventory within the warehouse to increase the ease of finding them in case need arises. Currently, the use of a computer software helps in forming an efficient and cost effective warehouse management system that increase productivity of a warehouse, as well as improving employees’ performance. Using internet spreadsheet programs help to keep track of all inventories and order new products within the petrochemical companies.
Warehouse managers in petrochemical companies have to ensure that all the inventories are identified and marked, to avoid mix up of products in the warehouse. Clear identification of natural gas liquids, coal, and crude oil ensure easy flow of inventory, as well as proper labeling of products for delivery to customers (“3 Key Benefits of an Effective Warehouse Management System” par. 3). Improvement in warehouse management increase productivity of the system to any petrochemical company.
A well-organized warehouse system would ensure that it maximize its profit. Actually, the warehouse offers the following services to the organization: the placement and recording input and output information in order to have a proper recording keeping of the business. Apparently, it offers extremely proficient services to any global company such as INEOS Chemical Company that operates in over fifty-one countries, including the United States. The fundamental business of INEOS Chemical Company is the purchase and sale of petrochemical products.
Definitely, the best valuable service such as the trade and sales services of such companies have always been because of the proper clearance management unit of the business since it ensures improvement in activities such as purchasing and marketing (Weil par. 8). Therefore, a business should ensure that it has first hand market knowledge and long-term commitments to both the suppliers and customers, which it can only achieve through an effective warehouse management system.
Beyond the business through the supply chain managers should concentrate on how to increase efficiency and minimize the cost of production through proper warehouse management, which the company should excellently improve. Therefore, improving the management of the company would allow it to focus on its core business enterprises. Definitely, a company can employ various practices for the improvement of its warehouse management to ensure better productivity and customer gratification (Meyer and Cannon 36).
Consequently, the management of the company’s warehouse should ensure that it deal with the aspects that gauge the performance of the warehouse. Categorically, they should ensure that they use the disregarded resources in order to deal with the pressures needed to manage multiple sales and purchasing of the organization. Besides, they should make sure that there is healthier incorporate order and operating delivery flows through examination of the warehouse management software as well as ensuring the use systems computerization. This would also lead to improvement of labor efficiency and workforce productivity in the organization.
Further, the organization should trace every bit of the warehouse operations done by individual employee. Ultimately, they ought to certify all these transactions using the automatic data capture. Such transactions incorporate verification of the location of goods in real time, as well as stalking of the inventory attributes such as lot numbers, serial numbers, size, style, and color. Product identification eases the shipping process, thus eliminating cases of grouping products in wrong collections points.
Given that a company needs to transact any of its businesses effectively in order to do well, the warehouse should improve its efficiency being one of the departments that determine the success of the business (Bolten 127). Subsequently, the company can ensure the achievement of its vision through the following approaches: To begin with, the warehouse management should maintain a thorough process log of any or all changes done in the warehouse. Instead, they certainly do point to problems that do not have weight in the failure of the organization, which later leads to poor production of the origination.
Therefore, monitoring of such errors would ensure better improvement in the organization, since there would be appropriate record keeping practices involving the actives such as training procedures of workers, recruitment of new workers, implementation of the new technology, as well as any other change within your warehouse (Meyer and Cannon 41). Furthermore, they should emphasize on processes that reinforce accountability of workers within the warehouse department, which would reduce the losses that the firm may incur. Definitely, the benefits realized in these methods are occasionally lost when workers avoid the appropriate system. Therefore, it is advisable for the managers to form an efficient workflow within the organization that establishes accountability and puts weight on the significance of precision by the employees.
In addition, the company management should offer some education courses as well as short training to the employees. This is exceptionally vital in circumstances where the firm would prefer to employ the use of technology in transaction of its business operations since it inspires them to their jobs efficiently. Although optional, willing employees would benefit a lot and the company would extremely benefit since the production level would improve because of these slight changes made by this organization. Moreover, the academy would also positively influence the culture at INEOS and form a learning environment with suitable leadership qualities. More to the point, the authorities of the warehouse should ensure that there are experienced leaders with suitable leadership qualities in the warehouse (“3 Key Benefits of an Effective Warehouse Management System” par. 5). Certainly, this would help in identification and quick responses to the problems that might result into massive losses for the organization.
The company can also improve on the productivity of the warehouse to ensure that there is profit maximization in within the organization. The company can achieve this through several strategies, such as effective communication within various departments of the organization. Evidently, proper communication among employees and employers within the organization would assist the organization to achieve its goals (Briggs 67). Indeed, this virtue is one of the crucial determinants of the effective warehousing operations. In addition, a petrochemical company ought to standardize its processes by reducing its potential variation in its key operational sectors in order to increase efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to customers.
They should also examine the activities that might lead to the reduction of the profits, as this would give them solutions to come up with better ways of improving the organization’s productivity through using the best process as much as possible (Bolten 129). Moreover, the management of the warehouse should measure the issues that directly affect the performance of the company. This action would ensure uninterrupted improvement in the business transactions of the organization. Subsequently, if the outcome may not be incredibly significant to both the customers and shareholders, it would not be necessary for the organization to take much of its time on this matter. In fact, when an organization decides to embrace a work measurement program to gauge and report warehouse performance at the employee level, it may increase its productivity by a certain percentage, which may result into maximization of the profit through proper cost of production and reduced rates such as the labor costs (Belcher par. 9).
The company’s leadership should also be given the necessary education to ensure that they know whatever each one of them is expected to do in the company. Actually, they should always carry out those activities, which ensure better productivity such as gathering of the necessary information, making the right decisions, as well as taking proper actions in every move they make in the firm. In fact, this would be extremely essential in ensuring improvement in the production of the warehouse and its management as well (“3 Key Benefits of an Effective Warehouse Management System” par. 8).
In addition, the company should determine the areas where the employees take much of their time. This would ensure permanent improvement to supply chain productivity, which vastly on where employees and management focus much of their time and attention. With the handling of liquid products, warehouse management in a petrochemical company remains a delicate issue that warehouse managers must ensure that they perfect their services to lower product loss through leakage. Since cost minimization is a target of all businesses, petrochemical companies have to institute varied tips that can increase the overall productivity of the warehouse. With high productivity, there is high maximization of returns on investments, which increases profitability.
Constant inventory evaluation is highly possible when there is proper binning of top hits. At the same time, increasing warehouse productivity requires inclusion of employees’ feedback in the operation; this will make them care about the job at all times (“3 Key Benefits of an Effective Warehouse Management System” par. 9). Controlling the working environment by making it lively, increases employees’ productivity. In this aspect, warehouse managers have to consider the comfort of their employees. Shipping and loading manifests clearly describes the direction and products to be followed and handled at all delivery time. Employees’ remunerations also affect warehouse productivity given that well remunerated workforce works to deliver the on the company’s goals and objective within the warehouse sector.
Evidently, based on the above points, the company can maintain long-standing relationships with the world leading manufacturers, as well as customers who use their services. With the given tips on improving warehouse productivity, petrochemical companies will be able to offer reliable and effective services to customers, and, at the same time, reduce cost of management. Warehouse managers have to implement the aforementioned tips in order to increase productivity of the warehouse and the company. Improvements in warehouse management further streamline supply chains and reduce costs of logistical services, thus promoting competitiveness in the current global and dynamic market.
Works Cited
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Belcher, Lynda Moultry. How to Organize the Storage of Inventory in a Warehouse. Small Business. N.p., n.d. Web.
Bolten, Ernst F. Managing Time and Space in the Modern Warehouse with Ready-to-Use Forms, Checklist & Documentation. New York: AMACOM, 1997. Print.
Briggs, Andrew J.. Warehouse Operations Planning and Management. New York: Wiley, 1960. Print.
Meyer, Don, and Casey Cannon. Building a Better Data Warehouse. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. Print.
Weil, Marty. A New Recipe for Effective Warehouse Management. Inbound Logistics. N.p., 2012. Web.