Ways Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) Can Improve your Warehouse Safety
Warehouses and go downs are consistently seeking an edge to increase productivity and enhance accuracy and productivity in their processes. Real-Time Location Systems have had a groundbreaking impact on manufacturing and warehousing, specifically in these three areas. Companies can also monitor their inventory as they undergo various warehousing processes.
An RTLS solution can help managers and supervisors update, locate and track the status of hundreds or even thousands of inventory products, whether stored at the warehouse or in transit. Moreover, the technology delivers such insights with precision and cost-effective automation. That will entirely transform your warehousing operations for the better. Here are some top ways organizations seek to improve business intelligence with RTLS.
- Inventory precision
Inventory precision is vital in warehousing, yet it is challenging to achieve. RTLS will help your business reach and also maintain about 99.9% inventory accuracy without the need for taxing and sometimes expensive inventory audits that could take many hours or even days. Unlike manual audits, Real-Time Location Systems provide immediate location information within minutes.
Additionally, the solution provides a precise and current visual of when and where your inventory travels. This is more time-efficient and saves substantial time per pallet move by removing the need for manual barcode scans every time a pallet is dropped or picked up from the warehouse. When moving many pallets, saving a few seconds per pallet will save you substantial minutes or hours.
- Labor management
When implemented effectively, RTLS helps the warehouse save significantly by enhancing the journey routing abilities. The accuracy the technology provides is unmatched; therefore, you can expect a major improvement in efficiency and productivity among the fleet drivers. Ultimately, your RTLS will provide a positive Return on Investments just for the efficiency savings.
- Enhanced traceability
RTLS technology can automatically monitor materials and inventory at the warehouse, from receipt and put away to packing, picking, and shipping. Therefore, it is a viable means of achieving real end-to-end visibility for the supply chain.
This technology allows businesses to easily track their items as they move through critical phases of the business process. For example, you can use RTLS to know when inventory items move from the staging floor for the following warehousing process.
- Increasing efficiency
Accessing real-time fleet driver movement information allows you to work together with your drivers to consistently polish and improve performance. That benefits both the business and the driver. For instance, a single palette will typically undergo a minimum of four movements during its time at the warehouse.
On average, it takes the driver 2 minutes to move each pallet, give or take. If your firm is shipping 30,000 pallets each week at about 2 minutes per pallet move, it will take 60,000 minutes to move those 30,000 pallets or 1000 hours. Manually calculating the drivers’ efficiency is quite challenging. After a deep analysis, most companies realize that the actual number of hours it takes the driver to move inventory around the warehouse can be twice or thrice the estimated time.
Accurately identifying areas where time is lost and why that is the case is also challenging. Since RTLS offers immediate, factual pallet and driver information, you’ll be able to pinpoint precisely where and how the extra time is spent. With this information at hand, you can efficiently make adjustments that work. The instantaneous information also guides your drivers to limit the amount of wasted time.
Within just half a year of implementing an RTLS technology, you might be able to lower the size of FLTs needed by an impressive 20%.
- Forklift safety
In the United States, approximately 20,000 individuals sustain severe injuries from forklift accidents yearly. The cost associated with these accidents is also placed at over $100 million. Your RTLS can also be a warehouse safety solution, providing comprehensive data on the root cause of various safety issues. It can either be through assigning accountability or redirecting the warehouse flow in an attempt to obliterate accident-probe hot spots.
A good example of warehouse management using RTLS for forklift safety is using driver data to understand why and how accidents occur. By examining speed and route data, it is easier to establish where things went wrong and how to devise a solution that ensures this never happens again.
Conclusion
The secret to using RTLS for business success is choosing how to use the data to propel improvement. Well, having real-time data is one thing, but interpreting it and translating those results to visible benefits is entirely different. With RTLS, you can gather data from various aspects of your warehousing operations for analysis.
Businesses rely heavily on data, especially in this technological era. If you have been running your business without a smart data system like the RTLS, now is an excellent time to reconsider.
