If your warehouse is starting to feel cluttered and crammed, you’re going to need to get in there and reorganize. Having a disorganized and cluttered warehouse is not only inefficient, it can also be very dangerous. Indeed, boxes and crates that aren’t stacked properly can fall and seriously injure workers or poorly placed flammable items could cause a fire. Both situations lend themselves to a high possibility of death and the loss of your business. If you want to keep your business running like a well oiled machine, then you need to start by getting your warehouse clean and well organized. Here are five tips for increasing warehouse storage capacity.
- Clear the clutter. If you haven’t done a huge purge of unneeded items in your warehouse in a while, then you’re probably overdue for one. You wouldn’t believe how much unneeded junk you can acquire in just a few years. If you have any interns or recent hires that are still lower on the pay scale, this could be the perfect job for them. There may need to be a bit of hand holding at first to make sure they know what they’re doing, but put a few kids on the job and train them well, and you’ll notice tons of space being cleared in your warehouse in just a couple of days.
- Maximize on your vertical space. If you find that it’s hard to get a forklift up and down the aisles of your warehouse, and there’s tons of open space up above, then you definitely need to start capitalizing on your vertical space. There are all kinds of storage solutions you can find for the different types of materials you carry. You just want to be sure that you can easily get a forklift running up and down all of your aisles, and it needs to be able to access everything in your warehouse and put things back in their appropriate places without knocking anything over.
- Limit empty space. If you have boxes or crates that are mostly empty, then you need to reorganize them. You may need to put partitions in boxes or place smaller boxes within larger boxes, but you want to avoid leaving empty spaces in boxes as much as possible. Just think about it this way, if on average, your boxes are only 70% full, then you could increase your storage capacity by 30% just by reorganizing and ensuring that they’re all 100% full. You can also visit Shaw Material Handling Systems, Inc. to explore all kinds of other organizing systems.
- Label everything. Once you’ve reorganized a bit you’re going to need to label everything. If you don’t, you’ll find that all of your hard work will be undone in no time. That’s because workers don’t only need to know where to find things, but they need to know where to put things back.
- Color code everything. Once you’ve got everything labeled you’re going to want to provide yourself with backup by color coding everything. This way the genius who puts the acetone where the acetic acid should go will have a big blue dot to look at next to all of the red ones on the shelf.