Is Your Stock Room A Complete Mess?

If you’ve got a business to run, there’s going to be one or two areas of the day to day management that you struggle with. There’s no shame in admitting this; you’re not superhuman after all! Once you’ve got the marketing strategy sorted, the local network goes down and you don’t know how to fix it, or you’ve got a new stock shipment coming in and you still haven’t shifted the last few boxes in the back.

Let’s focus on that latter for the time being, as it’s incredibly important. Every business has some kind of stockroom on their hands, and if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have any products ready to be sold. So in order to make sure you’re always maximizing your profit potential, and you’re rarely having to cut your losses with lost or out of date stock, here’s a couple of the best tips for getting your stockroom in better order.

You’ve got a lot to fill your front shelves with – make sure you can find the goods! (Unsplash)

Group Products Together

This is one of the main strategies for keeping your stockroom as organized as possible, but there’s still many businesses out there who don’t keep to it. When you receive a delivery, what is the first thing your employees do with the new stock? Do they sort it, with similar products being grouped onto the same shelf, or do you follow an alphabetical pattern?

Either way, you need to make sure that in your general use store, your toy products aren’t placed next to the bags of rice, or that in your high tech shop, your keyboards and mice aren’t on the opposite sides of the stock room! It makes the stock rotation a lot easier to manage, and means you’re not spending hours in there in the morning getting the day’s products altogether.

Get the Right Equipment

A lot of the time we rely on manual and physical labour to make sure the business is in order. But sometimes, human backs, arms, and legs just aren’t cut out for lifting crates and shifting huge carts. So you’re going to need assess both the need for new equipment and the safety issues surrounding your current practices –  not only is it going to be a lot healthier for something like a forklift or a lift in general to be used, but it also makes the whole process a lot faster.

So, have you got the right equipment to reach that top shelf? Have you got the right forklift attachments for making sure you can move that huge stack of boxes? If not, now’s the time to invest a little money for some much better business operations. When you’ve got an organised stockroom, you’re going to be in a much better position for shifting your stock (and so are your employees!).

Your stockroom is something to pay more attention to. You’re never going to be without it, so make sure you’ve got a proper system from now on.