Spring is here and with its arrival comes that sense of wanting to spruce things up. You know, do some “spring cleaning.”  With the shift in seasons, especially in cold-weather climes, maybe now is a good time to tackle a reorganization of your inventory storage methods. 

When you have a good inventory management system in place, it’s easy to know how much of a thing you have in stock, as well as how well it’s selling. Tied in with efficiently tracking inventory is being efficient with fulfilling orders.

Time is money. Making it hard for your employees to physically find items in your warehouse or stockroom to ship out is not efficient use of their time. That and finding half-filled boxes of merchandise littering the aisles of your inventory storage area are sure signs that it’s time for some physical reorganization.

Here are a few commonsense inventory storage tips:

• Designate specific areas of your stockroom or warehouse for similar items.

• Label boxes by type, description and barcode, or a unique number if you’re still using a manual process for inventory management. 

• Take labeling a step further by taking a photo of what’s inside the boxes. This will help eliminate pulling down boxes to see what’s inside. 

• Reduce clutter and save space by stacking boxes high rather than wide.

Creating a layout and labeling system for the physical storage of inventory may seem like a no-brainer but it doesn’t take much for busy employees to misplace boxes or scatter merchandise around when there is no set storage plan in place for them to follow, especially if there is pressure to fulfill lots of orders and ship them out fast.

Do you need an inventory storage plan? Time to spring into action.