5 Ways To Take Advantage of a Seasonal Slowdown

Champions don't ignore the off-season. Like manufacturing and warehouses, professional sports have slow and busy seasons. Yet, unlike many facilities, athletes don't look at slowdowns as downtime. They see an opportunity to improve, showing up to the season stronger and faster than before. Your facility can adopt that mindset and become the champions you were always meant to be with a few simple practices. Read on to learn five ways to take advantage of a seasonal slowdown.

1. Schedule Equipment Maintenance

The last thing you want during the busy season is to waste time with downed equipment. So, the first and most obvious way to take advantage of a seasonal slowdown is to schedule preventative maintenance for your equipment. This presents two distinct advantages. First, preventative maintenance can minimize or even eliminate unplanned downtime due to equipment breakdowns. This saves you crucial uptime during your busiest seasons. Second, when planned appropriately, scheduled maintenance can straddle your busy season. This removes the need for forklifts to rotate out of service during peak use to attend to planned maintenance needs.

The easiest way to take advantage of this seasonal benefit is to develop a service plan with your material handling partner. Partners like The Lilly Company can help schedule your maintenance so that your entire forklift fleet will be operational when busy season comes back around.

2. Flex Your Forklift Fleet

Another way to ensure you have all the lifting power you need to tackle busy season is to take advantage of a flexible forklift fleet. That means reinforcing your fleet with seasonal forklift rentals during peak demand. Then, when your warehouse's seasonal slowdown arrives, you can return your rentals and rely on your primary fleet. Using a flexible fleet like this ensures you're only paying for the forklifts you need when you need them, similar to the way you might use seasonal hires for staffing.

As your material handling partner, we have a whole fleet of seasonal rental forklifts available for fluctuations in warehouse demand. This range includes everything from light to heavy-duty models to ensure our rentals meet your needs.

3. Adopt New Technology

A manufacturing slowdown is also a good time to look to the future. As material handling technology advances, operations need to evolve in order to keep up with the state of the industry. A seasonal slowdown is the perfect time to adopt new technologies, such as converting your forklift fleet from IC to lithium-ion. Upgrading during the off-season means you’ll be even better prepared to tackle periods of peak demand when the time comes.

Automation is an emerging technology that provides enormous benefits for manufacturers and warehouses alike. Whether you’re interested in AGVs, AMRs, conveyors, or other warehouse automation options, our experts can help you integrate new technologies into your existing facility to ensure you’re up and running in time for the busy season.

4. Optimize Your Space

As a warehouse grows, so do its spatial requirements. Warehouse seasonal slowdowns are the perfect time to focus on optimizing your facility's layout. Optimizing storage can make a huge difference in your bottom line, eliminating wasted space and travel time. However, the infrastructure changes create a severe disruption while in progress. You can minimize the impact of that disruption by completing these upgrades during periods of lower demand.

Sometimes, it can be challenging to know exactly what changes your facility layout needs in order to improve. We can help there too. Our experts offer free warehouse optimization consultations to help you see the inefficiencies in your current space and what can be done to fix them.

5. Review and Improve

Your facility layout isn't the only thing that you can optimize during a slowdown. You can also review and improve your processes. If your forklifts have telematics or you use warehouse management software (WMS), you're collecting vast amounts of data about almost every aspect of your fleet. This data can be analyzed to identify areas of inefficiency and generate solutions to optimize your processes. Examining this data can be a time-consuming task. So, slowdowns when you can devote more of your focus are the best times to buckle down and get into the details.

Your Slow Season Trainer

When the slow season arrives, and you are ready to make your facility better than ever, sometimes you need help knowing where to start. Think of us as your slow-season trainer. With over a century of experience, we have the knowledge you need to identify inefficiencies and waste. Our experts can help you optimize your facility on every level so that you show up to busy season as a champion. To learn more about how The Lilly Company can help you improve during your seasonal slowdowns, contact us online or visit one of our locations:

Arkansas - Jonesboro
Alabama - Birmingham, Dothan, Irondale, Madison, Mobile, and Montgomery
Mississippi - Belden, Tupelo, and Richland
Tennessee - Jackson, Memphis, Knoxville, and Kingsport

Further Reading
A Beginner’s Guide to Forklift Maintenance Agreements
AGVs 101: Your Guide To Autonomous Warehouse Vehicles
8 Expensive Warehouse Design Mistakes