When your business involves having a warehouse, tracking your items can get tricky in an instant if you do not know how to use the space in your storage room effectively. You may be tempted to chuck in all your products into your warehouse.
But if you want to track your stock effectively and if you want to deliver your products to your customers quickly, you should learn how to maximise the space in your warehouse.
Making sense of all the chaos
When it’s your first time to operate a warehouse, it can be a daunting task trying to store your items in it. With ample space, you are tempted to just place everything you have wherever you want, without a system. But if you want some form of order, there is a systematic way to do it.
Start by purchasing large or big plastic bins, and make sure they’re durable because lugging them around will eventually wear down less-sturdy containers. After you are done, you can move on to designing a shelf for your containers.
Designing shelves
Before you start designing shelves, you should first figure out how heavy your load is and how fast you need to get to your items. If your items sell fast and your replenishment is quick as well, then you should look into shelves built with multi-level systems so that you can access your items quickly.
If you plan on stocking a lot of products in your warehouse and those are quite heavy, then you need shelves made of steel so that they’re sturdy enough to support the weight. Also, steel shelves are strong enough to even support additional weight, like a person stepping onto it to reach an item, which will occasionally happen in a warehouse.
But if you are looking for a simple shelf because your stocks do not move too quickly, then you might want to look into boltless shelves. These shelves are easy to install and do not require too much equipment to put it up.
Measuring the capacity of your warehouse
Another thing you should take note of when maximising the space in your warehouse is the spaces between shelves or the aisle space. You must not only allot enough space for your people to gain access easily to each rack, but you also have to be careful taking up space in your warehouse.
If you have items that are quite heavy, you might need a forklift to move them around. If this is the case, then you should allot enough space for a forklift to pass through without colliding or even scraping the shelves.
So, these are just some of the things you need to think about when you are trying to maximise the space in your warehouse.
Coming up with a storage system
As mentioned earlier, you should purchase large plastic bins to store your items, but you should not just put any item in any container without a proper storing system. Otherwise, you will spend hours looking for an item you cannot remember where you placed.
Come up with a system that explains why a product goes where and how, and then label them.
These are just some of the ways you can efficiently run a warehouse facility. The important thing is you put a system in place to avoid the chaos.