When it comes to utilizing as much space as you can in your warehouse, you don’t want to miss any areas you could be filling up with inventory. Even in the smallest of warehouses, there can be so many ways to use the area around you to your benefit.
Using any available space you do have could give you more opportunities to store products, keep equipment in a safe space, and make sure your employees don’t feel too crowded in their workspace.
1. Look Up
It may be extremely helpful, if physically possible within your warehouse, to go up. If you have more room on your shelving or pallet racking systems to go higher. This could give you more room to stock products and get pallets to boxes off the floor.
Another way of going up could be creating over isle storage. This could entail putting support beams above your already existing shelving units and keep an abundance of pallets or other larger items that could be taking up too much space in other areas.
2. The Right Storage
Figuring out the layout of your warehouse can be crucial when going about organizing it currently. This can be narrowing down the best storage procedure for your building. This can change if it might be a tall, but cramped building or a wide and shorter ceiling building. Whatever it may be, using the right storage options is key.
This could mean looking at floor storage, starting your pallets on the ground, and working up from there. Or, using pallet racking setups where they may be higher up and wider. These racking systems can also be doubled side by side, or have the option to get to higher lengths than floor stacking. Each of these options has their pros and cons to them, but it can all depend on what kind of building your warehouse is, or even what the products you are shelving are.
3. Pushing in Isles
One of the simplest conclusions to come to would be making the isles of your shelving smaller. Possibly reducing them from 12 feet to 10 feet, or even smaller. Of course, this can all depend on whether you must get machinery like a forklift through the isle, so you must take that into consideration as well.
However, if the equipment doesn’t need to be worked through these areas, this could be a great way to save space, or even add a whole other row of shelving all together. Condensing can do wonders for the space around you.
4. Control Your Warehouse
Control your warehouse, don’t let it control you. This is a great way to look at the floor and space around you and see if any of it can be utilized as storage around you. There are sometimes empty areas around shipping or receiving that go unnoticed. These could be great places for inventory.
Being able to look at your warehouse like a grid and understanding the layout both on the floor and high to the ceiling is key when you want to save space. Saving space can help clean, create more room, and even show you any other changes you may want to make later on.