Running a warehouse can be very stressful, and if your warehouse is not well organized and not appropriately managed, your well-oiled machine could start to get a bit rusty. To keep things under control, you need to think a bit about how you can reorganize your layout, and how you can create systems for easier access to the things you need most. Here are five warehouse inventory control tips.
Keep everything in neat orderly stacks. When you are doing an inventory count, it’s easiest if everything is kept in neat stacks, and if those stacks are all equal in height. If you do this, then you don’t have to count each and every individual item, you can just count the stacks and multiply. If your stacks aren’t perfectly neat, however, your numbers could be off. So you want to be sure everything is very orderly.
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Make sure everything is clearly labeled. One of the biggest reasons why warehouses become disorganized and fall into disarray is because everything is not fully labeled. Each aisle should have a list of items that it contains, from the major items to the minor items. If it’s in that aisle, it needs to be listed. From there, each stack and each shelf need to be labeled so that everything is easy to find and put away.
Take advantage of your vertical space. If you have a large warehouse that feels cramped, it may be because you’re not fully taking advantage of all of your vertical space. If you’re having trouble getting crates and pallets up to the top of your storage space, it could be because you don’t have the right equipment. If this is the case, you can find all kinds of forklifts, cherry pickers, and other state-of-the-art equipment for your warehouse at Shaw Material Handling Systems, Inc.
Color code your warehouse. Of course, labeling is extremely important in your warehouse, but what if you have several employees who either don’t speak English or just don’t read well? No matter what your situation is, you may find that things stay much better organized when you color-code your warehouse. You could buy all kinds of colored crates, or you could also just get several cans of spray paint and throw a stripe or two on your pallets, crates, boxes, etc.
Keep the items you use most frequently toward the front. If a lot of the items that are used most frequently used aren’t easy to get to, then they will often be misplaced out of laziness. Otherwise, they will just cause a lot of traffic and wasted time because your employees will be traveling much farther than necessary to get to the things they use most. That’s why you want to organize your warehouse in such a way that your most frequently used items are toward the front, and the things that you seldom need are toward the back.