Statistics show that 34% of businesses have shipped an order late because they sold a product that wasn’t actually in stock.
How can you prevent this from happening in your business? Are you taking inventory consistently? Are your products easy to find, or is the area an unorganized mess?
Keeping track of your product inventory and knowing how to find it efficiently is important to be able to turn around orders quickly.
Keep reading to learn inventory storage ideas that you can use to keep your warehouse organized.
Table of Contents
1. Start With the Floor Plan
Before you can attack the physical inventory storage on the shelves, you should design a floor plan that makes the most sense for your business operations within the warehouse.
Is there a forklift that brings product in on pallets? If so, you will need to account for the amount of room the forklift needs to move around the shelves. Design a few different floor plan options and walk through them with those who work the floor to see what the most efficient option will be.
2. Try a Variety of Inventory Storage Ideas
There are many ways to organize your inventory within your warehouse, and you can use these different inventory storage ideas together to make it more cohesive. Installing selective racking will allow you to store pallets off of the ground and take up space vertically.
For smaller inventory, it can be helpful to divide the products into totes or bins to access them easily for shipping. Discussing different storage ideas for inventory with your shipping team can help you see which options would fit their workflow best.
3. Develop a Strategy for Taking Inventory
While you may have a perfectly designed warehouse, how you take inventory is also important. Going through the same process each time can help to ensure that it is accurate.
Having an accurate report of your current stock can prevent you from overselling or underselling any one product.
4. Clean Often
Stay clean helps in the effort to be organized. Whether you assign the task to a specific group of employees or outsource the work elsewhere, staying up to date on cleaning will greatly benefit your warehouse.
Cleaning can also lead to generating more space for inventory. Getting rid of old boxes and any other materials taking up the precious shelf space can make more room for products to be stored.
5. Label Everything
Do you currently have a system for labeling where you can find each product? Are they separated by areas of the warehouse, colored bins, or specific tags?
Coming up with a system for labels and marking everything from the inventory to the shelves is key to stay organized long term. You need a process for when a shipment of product arrives how to quickly unload it and be able to turn around a ship it to a customer seamlessly.
Get Smarter With Storage Today
Now that you have read about a few inventory storage ideas, you can start organizing your warehouse right away. An unorganized area can lead to mistakes in the fulfillment of orders for your business. Check out our website for more helpful articles like this one.