9 Tips For Organizing Your Inventory

As anyone who manages a facility knows, time is money. Unfortunately, a messy and cluttered inventory room takes time to sort through to find the right items. Employees can end up wasting hours looking for what they need if you don’t have an efficient and organized inventory setup. Here’s how to organize your inventory the right way. 

1. Banish Clutter

If your inventory room is cluttered, it can induce a ton of workplace stress for you and everyone else involved. If time equals money, then spending time stumbling around in a poorly organized room full of clutter is a waste of both. 

Take the time to get rid of old boxes, obsolete parts and other items that don’t belong but are being stored there. You could also enlist a few employees to tackle the job after hours or on the weekend. Then you can make a plan to banish the clutter that’s accumulated at the end of every week. If you make it a regular habit, you’ll never have to spend hours organizing again. 

2. Consider How To Organize Your Inventory

Before you or your employees dive in and start trying to organize the inventory area, consider how best to organize the items. Consider the business you are in. Would it make sense to organize by manufacturer or vendor? Or would it make sense to organize your products by type of application? 

3. Utilize Vertical Storage Methods

Take the time to draw out the plan for your inventory area and include vertical and horizontal methods. Just make sure you store only lightweight items up high. Also, make sure you place safe stepladders or stools in the room so that your inventory items can be accessed safely and easily. 

4. Install Good Lighting

The most well-organized inventory room in the world won’t be as efficient or easy to navigate if you don’t invest in good lighting. Poor lighting can make items and labels hard to see plus items can fall between shelves or storage bins and be forgotten. 

5. Keep the Most Commonly Needed Items Readily Available

Know which parts are most needed and keep them on hand at all times. This could mean making sure you have enough spares and reordering a part whenever one is used. For example, if you find that you always need time delay relays, make sure you have several of each type on hand in the inventory room. This will keep your employees from having to stop running machinery for what could be 24 hours while waiting for a replacement part. This will also cut down the need to pay expedited shipping costs. 

6. Label Parts

Labeling parts with the name, part number or reorder number is a must, though you can go one step further and label the parts with barcode. Barcoding equipment is an investment that can save time and prevent the errors people make when recording numbers. 

7. Store Heavy Parts Down Low

Even if you have the perfect space for those heavy parts on a shelf, don’t place them there. If you or someone else has to physically lift the heavy load off a shelf to use it, it’s not worth the potential injury. Instead, store heavy items on the floor and follow workplace safety rules by using a hand truck or pushcart to move them. If items do have to be picked up, provide safety training for employees and post instructional sheets for safe lifting in the room for reference. 

8. Restrict Access to the Inventory Room

If you want to keep an accurate count of inventory and have the parts you need when you need them, it’s crucial to restrict access to the inventory room. Install a keypad with a code you can change weekly on the door and only give the code to a select number of people, such as management and parts personnel. Ideally, the room should only have one door and you should install security cameras. You can also ensure those who enter the area record their names, date, time and part(s) they took in a logbook for accountability. With potentially thousands of dollars of inventory in stock, you’ll need to keep a close tab on who accesses the area. 

9. Get Creative When Counting Inventory

If you wait until a specific week each year to count the inventory you haven’t counted for a year, you’re going to end up spending a lot of time on the task. Instead, get creative with your inventory counting methods. For example, you may choose to count your inventory in cycles by dividing your inventory into a certain number of sections and counting/recording one section every month.