A well-organized warehouse is an effective warehouse. There’s no question of where items are, how much of that item you’re currently storing, or where new pallets are to be placed when they come in. It’s also safer and more cost-effective.
If you start out with a strong organizational plan in mind, your warehouse may always be fairly well organized, but if you don’t, turning chaos into order may be a little more difficult.
Here are some tips for organizing your warehouse and making it more efficient.
Have a Plan
It’s important to start out with a good game plan before you start moving pallets and shelves around. You don’t want to do things without an endgame in mind. Otherwise, you may end up moving warehouse shelving around several times before you decide you like it, and that’s a lot of work and time.
Start by gathering the measurements of everything you’ll be moving around. If you’re just shifting pallets, you may not need to do this, but if your organization plan involves shifting shelving or other fixtures around, make sure everything will fit like you want it to before you start moving things.
Put Like Items Together
One way to organize your warehouse is to put all of the like items together. Place all of your pallets of food in one section, paper goods in another, etc. This way, you’ll have an idea of exactly where everything is going to go when it comes in.
This type of organization may not necessarily go beyond generic categories, though. For example, you may not know exactly where a pallet will be within each section, but you know which aisle or aisles it will be in. You may also need to have an overflow area just in case you underestimate how many aisles of shelving a section will need.
Make Sections for Companies
If your warehouse only stores products for specific companies, you can use that as your main organizational model. Designate sections of your warehouse for each company. You can even further divide those sections into subsections for different types of items like outlined above.
This makes it really easy to know where everything is. You can also use this type of model to adjust your invoicing. Companies that need more of your warehouse space may need to pay more for it.
Organize by Codes
You can organize your warehouse by a coding system of your own creation. For example, you can split your warehouse into six different color-coded sections, then give each aisle within each section a number or letter. As each pallet comes it, it’s scanned and assigned a color and an aisle.
While there’s no connection between what the item is and where it’s going, this method does have a few advantages. The exact location of the item is logged, plus there’s no worry about a section being too large or too small. Products are simply placed on the next available space. The downside is that an order may involve fetching pallets from different sections and aisles, which can add time to a job.
In the end, there’s no one right way to organize your warehouse. Whichever way you choose to organize your space, let the shelving experts at Murray Material Handling know exactly what you need to get started, so we can effectively help you organize your warehouse!
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