If you’re in any shipping or manufacturing business, you know that efficient inventory management has a direct impact on your business’s viability and the resulting profitability of your clients’ contracts with you. This means that you may need a supply chain solution to make your warehouse more efficient and to manage your inventory more cost-effectively.
Here are 2 tips on how to run a tighter ship in your company’s warehouse.
Space vs Inventory
Your first reaction to running out of inventory space may be to make costly renovations to your warehouses to make them bigger. You may be ignoring the more cost-effective way to expand the space in your warehouse, however, and it doesn’t require any additional construction: taking advantage of vertical space.
There are two ways you can do this. One is to invest in taller shelves and forklifts to retrieve the items. This will increase the available space in your warehouse simply by utilizing more of the vertical space between the floor and the roof. It will also allow you to store more of the most shipped items nearer to the loading bay, which could reduce your overall retrieval time and improve your shipping efficiency.
Another way to better utilize space is to invest in different kinds of shelves. If you only have one type of shelf but many types of inventory, then all your shelves have to be built to accommodate larger and more inconvenient items. This means that the smaller items may be taking up more space than they need by fitting awkwardly into the big shelves.
By diversifying the types of shelves you buy, you can improve the efficiency of the storage space in your warehouses and also make it easier to find certain items, which will cut down on delivery times.
Prevent Inventory Overflow
One of the biggest hindrances to efficiency in inventory management is overflow. This comes from over-ordering your most high-value or popular items to make sure you always have enough. However, warehouse space is expensive, and over-estimating your need for certain items could be costing you.
Perfecting your ordering habits so that you always have only what you need to meet your shipments requires experience. There are other ways to expedite the process.
As mentioned, you can make sure that frequently shipped items are stored near the loading bay for easier accessibility. You can also reorganize your warehouses to group items together that frequently ship out in the same deliveries, saving your workers from retrieving multiple items from different shelves every time an order comes in.
The space you have available in your warehouse could be a solution to your efficiency problems in your business, rather than a hindrance. The right organization can go a long way towards prioritizing time and efficiency in your deliveries and the rate at which they’re shipped out.
American Manufacturing Solutions provides services for supply chains that help them in packing, assembly, and shipping so that their methods are as efficient as they need to be to satisfy their customers. Contact us today!
