Is your warehouse prepared for business growth?

Is your warehouse prepared for business growth?

In their latest blog, Warehouse Systems Limited discuss how to prepare your warehouse for business growth with some handy tips:

As a business owner, the words ‘thriving’ and ‘growth’ within your organisation will be music to your ears. This can only mean your business is proving to be very successful with profitability increasing! Through the pressures of competitive market’s and economic turmoil your business continues to evolve. Although this is something to be celebrated, operations within your warehouse can become chaotic if you don’t keep the growth of your business in check.

An increase in demand may lead to a welcomed rise in sales, however with additional stock passing through your warehouse and an increase in staff numbers you may feel your facility has reached its limit on how it can accommodate your business and that its time to move to larger premises.

Although relocating may be the desired option, it can also be time consuming, un-settling for the business and very costly. WSL have spent 30 years helping growing businesses optimise their warehouse space to support increased storage and production flow, whilst saving them time and money. You need to ask yourself these questions:

Has the limit has been reached within your original storage solution, and now your warehouse is becoming cluttered and disorganized?

Are items stored wherever they land and some even on the floor?

Are the same items stored in multiple areas of the warehouse?

Does it take more time than expected to find and retrieve stock?

Rather than relocate, WSL can help find an alternative time efficient, cost effective and simpler solution. The space you already have may actually be sufficient if reorganized and effectively used.

Categorize Inventory
Reorganizing your inventory to enable better visibility and easy access will allow for quick and efficient storing and picking. Keeping stock in order, neat and tidy with full access and visibility will improve overall operational function. Once inventory is in order a systematic approach will help maintain efficiency with the use of barcode warehouse labels which can be positioned on racks, shelves and floors. Warehouse labels are an easy and effective way of allowing you to keep track of inventory passing through the warehouse and will help find the precise location of items required at any given time, quickly and efficiently.

Aim High
Are you using all available vertical space? Unused height area can be converted into valuable storage space. If there is sufficient space between the top of your current storage and the ceiling alongside appropriate FLT capabilities, you could add more storage above by extending the height of your pallet racking.

Slim Down
Reducing the width of your aisles could enable you to add more rows of racking, providing the new width matches your current fork lift truck size. If you have sufficient cubic space in terms of height and floor space you can slim down and aim high at the same time, drastically increasing storage capacity.

Double Up
Look at the current layout to consider the possibility of doubling the depth of your storage? If you are currently using a standard APR racking system, with enough floor space this can easily be reconfigured to create another run of racking directly on the back of your current system in order to double the number of pallet locations and increase storage density.

Level Up
Transform your facility by creating a raised storage area or a working platform with the installation of a mezzanine floor which can drastically increase available floor space. A single or multi-tier mezzanine floor can be used for additional storage space, offices, retail space or staff facilities.

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