The Complete Warehouse Organization Guide: This Is What You Need to Do

In the United States, there are about 430,000 warehouses

This may seem like a lot, but with limited space to build new warehouses, it can be difficult for you to find one. If you do find one, you want to make sure you maximize the space in that building.

Are you trying to learn how to organize your warehouse? If yes, you should check out our warehouse organization guide below.

Have a Good Floor Plan

When you’re organizing your warehouse, you should first come up with a floor plan or a blueprint.

This will be helpful before you start putting everything in an unorganized fashion. You can play with the diagrams and see how much physical space you can maximize.

Planning it on paper can help you visualize it better, and it will help you overcome any obstacles that come up with your organization. You should make sure that you also come up with a good system of organizing so that you can find all of the items quickly and easily.

When you make your floor plan, try to group like items close together. This will make it easier for your employees to find the items. For example, if you are a clothing retailer, make sure you put the women’s clothes next to the women’s clothes. You can have different sections for each type of clothes as well.

You may also want to utilize the 80-20 rule when organizing your warehouse. This means that you will use 20% of your warehouse for sales and 80% for orders that come through.

Get Some Storage Shelves

After you come up with the perfect floor plan for your warehouse, you want to get some good storage shelves.

You should focus on buying quality warehouse racking. Once you find a good quality shelf, you’ll want to buy a lot of them as well. If you buy shelves that are high quality, they’ll last you a lot longer, and you won’t have to spend the time and money to replace them.

Pallet racking systems are good shelving options because they are really durable and can support a lot of weight. They will also last you a long time. In addition to that, they will also be safe so you won’t have to worry about your employees getting injured.

If you don’t want to use that system, there are other systems as well such as cantilever racks, push back shelving, and dive-in or drive-through racking.

The best choice will depend on your business type and how big your operation is. You’ll also need to think about the size and volume of the products that will be stored in your warehouse.

In addition to racking and shelves, you may also need to get some shipping containers, storage bins, and freezers or coolers.

Use Your ABCs

When you are trying to organize and store your inventory, you should use the ABC system. This is an analysis of your inventory divided into three different categories.

You can divide your inventory into A items. These will be the best-selling items that won’t take up much space or cost in your warehouse. If they’re constantly flying off the shelves, you won’t have to worry about them sitting in your warehouse for too long.

B-items will be mid-range items that sell frequently, but they may cost more to store than A-items would.

C-Items will be the rest of the items that don’t fall into the other two categories. These will be the ones that end up contributing to your bottom line.

This ABC analysis is one way that you can apply your 80-20 rule that we talked about earlier.

Recycle

If you’re environmentally conscious, you may already have started recycling at your business. But did you know that recycling can actually help keep your warehouse nice and organized?

Reduce, reuse, and recycle can make your business a little bit more organized. If you run a green warehouse, you will reuse a lot of items.

You can reduce clutter in your warehouse by making sure you get rid of all the garbage and recycle what you can.

A lot of what you throw away may even be recyclable. Half of the storage pallets are normally thrown away after they’re used once, but you can normally reuse them as well.

You can also recycle a lot of metal, steel, iron, glass, and wood. If the item you’re recycling isn’t too damaged, you can separate the items and have them recycled to be used for something else.

You are helping the environment but also making sure that your warehouse is clean.

Label Everything

Before you put everything into the warehouse, you should make sure that everything is clearly labeled.

You should label everything from the actual products to the shelves, docks, and racks.

Labeling is helpful because if you have new employees, they will be able to easily navigate through the maze of the warehouse. It also helps to make sure that stuff isn’t misplaced.

There are all kinds of warehouse label solutions that are designed to make your warehouse as organized as possible.

If you choose the right labeling system, your warehouse will be streamlined and easy to navigate. It may help to improve productivity as well, which will be a good investment on your end.

When you do choose a system of labeling, make sure that you stick with it so that it’s consistent and easily read. 

Utilize These Warehouse Organization Tips to Maximize Your Space

These warehouse organization tips are great ways to maximize your space and cut costs.

These tips will ensure that your business runs a little bit more smoothly, and your employees will definitely thank you for it.

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