A Guide to an Efficient Facility

A common question for facility managers is “How can I make my facility more efficient?”. A well-organized and efficient facility makes facility managers’ jobs easier, as well as providing a great base for future expansion and growth. An efficient facility requires an optimal work environment, easily managed inventory, a high level of facility safety, and minimized delays in facility processes.

What Makes an Optimal Working Environment

Providing employees with the ability to work close to their respective processes is a great step towards an optimal working environment. A great way to do this is implementing modular offices as they are an excellent way to keep your staff close to their processes while also providing a safe and comfortable office environment. Whether it’s creating offices for staff, conference rooms, break areas, or cleanrooms, modular offices offer a durable long-lasting solution. Modular offices are fully customizable and can be integrated into pre-existing walls or fully built out. They also can be easily reconfigured to grow with your facility as you expand! Another solution that helps to keep employees close to their processes is workstations. Workstations provide an area for employees to perform tasks in a well-organized and sturdy space. These solutions can also be outfitted with modular drawers, shelving, and cabinets.

Inventory Management Made Simple

When you have proper storage in place, inventory becomes much easier to manage. One of the most common solutions for efficient storage is pallet racking. Pallet racking is a staple to facility storage, as it offers vertical storage for items of all sizes and is quite versatile. Pallet racking comes in many different styles such as teardrop, push back, or drive-in, and can be installed just about anywhere, inside or out! Mezzanines are another solution that can help simplify inventory management. Like pallet racking, mezzanines are highly versatile and can be utilized for more than just storage, such as applications involving production or traversal. By utilizing vertical space, mezzanines help avoid the costly expense of building an expansion or building a new facility. This makes them a cost-effective alternative to giving your facility more usable space!

Maintaining Safety

Having a safe facility is important as it minimizes the risk of injury and damage. Safety should be included in all aspects of your facility. Examples of some safety products that we recommend are safety gates, bollards, guardrails, truck restraints, and even ergonomic lifts. Safety gates provide access to staff and materials (depending on the type of gate) while maintaining high levels of safety as they close access points to unsafe areas when not in use. They come in a variety of options including for docks, pallet access, and personnel gates. Bollards are an essential safety solution as they protect accessways, doors, or lifts from impact damage. These are common solutions found in many facilities today, however, older styles of these bollards may present a tripping hazard after implementation. Luckily, our bollards have an innovative design that keeps the footplate tapered away from pathways to help prevent this tripping hazard! Guardrail can be implemented throughout your facility. It is a highly durable, customizable, and easy-to-install safety solution that provides a high level of visibility to walls, walkways, and other solutions. This ultimately helps to outline areas where forklift traffic is present as well as protect against accidental impact damage to surrounding equipment. Truck restraints are a crucial safety feature to include in your loading dock area. They latch onto the carrier trailer and act as a resisting force keeping the trailer place during on and off-loading, preventing trucks from rolling away from the dock. These solutions can even help in lifting the trailer to the desired dock height should the dock path be at an incline or decline. Ergonomic lifts allow employees to work on heavier items at an ergonomically safe height, keeping staff from having to bend down or work on the equipment at awkward angles or heights.

Minimizing Delay

Delays are an unfortunate side effect of a busy facility. While keeping busy ensures your facility’s success, it is important to find ways to keep delays in your processes to a minimum. One way of doing this is keeping your high-usage solutions from breaking down. This can be done through preventative maintenance, which is the process of scheduling service check-ups for your equipment to keep it up and running. High-usage solutions that benefit from this preventative maintenance are overhead doors, dock equipment, material lifts (VRCs), ergonomic lifts, and some automated solutions such as conveyors. We recommend annual or bi-annual preventative maintenance services for this equipment! Another way of minimizing delays is what we talked about previously, effectively managing your inventory. Providing staff with proper inventory storage solutions will allow them to pick items and parts quicker and thus move finished items down the line more efficiently. Automated systems are a great way of providing efficient inventory management, especially vertical lift modules (VLMs) or Hänel units. These solutions store inventory in an efficient manner as well as bringing inventory directly to the user, making it quick and easy to pull the items they are looking for. When implemented correctly, VLMs help to minimize delays by optimizing the way inventory is stored and tracked!

In Conclusion

The importance of an efficient facility cannot be overstated for facility managers seeking to enhance productivity and safety. A well-organized facility is characterized by an optimal working environment, streamlined inventory management, a commitment to maintaining high levels of safety, and effective strategies to minimize delays in processes. Embracing these efficient practices becomes not just a choice but a necessity for sustained success and growth in the ever-changing business environment. Looking to make your existing facility more efficient? Or are you looking to outfit a brand-new facility? We can help either way! Contact us today!