Inevitably, growing businesses will need to expand their warehouse space. If you are considering expanding your facilities, you may be doing it prematurely because of common warehouse management oversights. You might be surprised at how much space you can free up without needing more square footage, especially if your business hasn’t grown as much as your storage needs have.
4 Suggestions to Look into Before Renting or Buying More Warehouse Space
#1 Use More Vertical Space
This includes the vertical space above and within your racks. If you have a substantial amount of low to medium turnover inventory, it isn’t necessary to store it on the ground or at waist level. Use taller racks and store these items on the higher shelves. Is the vertical space between successive shelves excessive? Some empty space above your products is necessary for easy access, but too much is a waste of space that quickly adds up if this is typical of your shelving.
#2 Find Better Suppliers
Suppliers with excessive lead times or with reliability issues, force you to compensate by maintaining a larger inventory. Long lead times require extra inventory to cover these excessive delivery times, and unreliable deliveries create uncertainty, which requires more safety stock or buffer stock to compensate for potential delays.
#3 Immediately Put Away Received Items
Allowing new items to clutter up the receiving area and to spill over into your warehouse uses up space and gets in the way of your daily operations. In extreme cases, pickers end up getting inventory from the receiving area because the normal inventory shelves have run out. This is hugely inefficient for the pickers and may cause an inaccurate inventory count. In addition, receivers should never randomly place items in convenient places that happen to be empty.
#4 Use Technology
Bar code scanning or RFID technology, combined with inventory management software allows you to keep a real-time count of your inventory. Inventory management software includes advanced analytics that improve your ability to spot dead and slow-moving inventory. This technology combination helps prevent redundant orders for inventory you already have and alerts you to (or automatically reorders) items that are running low.
Save on warehouse storage expenses by following the above suggestions and contacting us for information and help with your warehousing needs.
