How to Organize and Manage Warehouse Inventory

As a business owner, your shipping and receiving center is perhaps the most important organ of your entire company’s operations. Without an efficiently organized warehouse, merchandise will take longer to ship, inventory will become damaged, and productivity levels amongst your warehouse workers will drop, thus creating a vicious cycle. This is why properly organizing and managing your warehouse inventory is so crucial. If inventory is disorganized, you will have a much harder time streamlining your warehouse operations. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to streamline, organize, and manage your inventory so that you can get your shipping and receiving center back on track. Here is how to organize and manage warehouse inventory.

1. Make sure that you have all your SKUs locked down in a central database. If you don’t have a central database, you need to get one. Once you have a system set up, you will need to plug in all your SKUs. If you don’t, you could be dealing with lags in picking merchandise. Plus, products may be logged that are not in stock and you could be dealing with angry customers.
2. Place your fastest selling products in the front of the warehouse. Ideally, you want to place your fastest selling items in the front of your warehouse. This will be critical for the sake of moving the items from your warehouse into the trucks as fast as possible. The last thing you want is for your warehouse employees to be running all the way to the back of the warehouse to retrieve merchandize. This could increase the chances of damage and an injury.
3. Store and organize your merchandise on high pallet racks to maximize space. Instead of storing things horizontally, you want to store things vertically. The higher you go, the more space you will have on the ground. This is why you want to visit a retailer like Heubel Material Handling, Inc. to invest in palleting racks for vertical storage. When it comes to warehouse storage solutions, stacking vertically will be the key to managing your inventory.
4. Keep your aisles clear to avoid breaking or damaging your product. When it comes down to it, you also want to be sure to keep all your aisles clear. If you don’t, you could create a situation where your employees are bottlenecked. Moreover, having messy aisles could result in damaged product as a result of falls, spills, and forklift crashes. This is why you want to have protocols in place for keeping this space clean and clear.
5. Make sure that your warehouse workers have set roles. On top of everything, you also want to lock down roles for your warehouse employees. If there are no clear and definable roles, it will be incredibly difficult to properly manage your merchandise. For instance, you want to have people at the front of your warehouse, the back of your warehouse, and you want to have managers keeping everything in check. In the end, having proper role assignments will greatly improve the organization and management of your inventory.