By Elise Dobson
What is a Retail Warehouse?
A retail warehouse is the place that holds your store’s inventory. Customers cannot explore this area, but it is one of the most important spaces in any physical store.
As a retail store owner, you may have put a lot of thought into designing your store layout, but what about organizing your storage warehouse?
Even though your storage warehouse is not visible to customers, proper planning and organization are just as important there as they are on the sales floor. Organization can affect many aspects related to store efficiency, from customer service speed and inventory counting to product safety.
Are you ready to transform the chaos of your retail warehouse into a storage space you’ll enjoy having? This guide will show you how to do it.
The Importance of Organizing Your Retail Warehouse
It’s easy for retailers to let their storage warehouse get the better of them, especially since it’s a private area few customers enter. Let’s take a look at why neglecting your storage warehouse is a mistake.
Quickly Finding Shopper Orders
Stores with reduced inventory operate with limited stock on the sales floor. Hiding stock in the storage room is a technique used by many retailers to improve interaction with shoppers. A request for product availability opens the door for conversation.
That conversation fades quickly if you spend 15 minutes searching through a pile of inventory in your storage warehouse. In the meantime, the customer waiting on the sales floor loses interest because you disappeared into the storage for too long.
Keep the customer distracted by having an organized storage warehouse. Go, find the item they are looking for, and bring it back to them as quickly as possible.
Consider the busiest workday. We have a large inventory, and searching for one product can take a long time. Having a system in your storage warehouse that everyone understands can help avoid any last-minute panic and save you valuable time. – Alice Oquida, Founder of Authentic House
How to Organize Your Retail Warehouse
Are you ready to pay more attention to how your retail warehouse is organized? Let’s look at seven simple ways to get things in order.
1. Choose the Right Retail Warehouse Layout
The size of your retail warehouse will limit what you can and cannot do when it comes to organizing your products. If you have a large, open warehouse with a warehouse-style layout, the sky’s the limit. But if you have a smaller, compartmentalized warehouse, you might need to get creative with shelving and offsite storage.
Regardless, identify your operational workflow to optimally utilize the storage warehouse. Answer these questions: How often do I go to my storage warehouse? How long does it take me to find what I’m looking for when I go to the storage warehouse? Do I use the storage solely for packing and shipping or for storage too? What is my ideal storage warehouse layout? What is preventing me from achieving that?
As you answer these questions, you might find that the current storage warehouse you have doesn’t meet your needs at all. Rethinking the entire store layout can give you faster and easier access to the products you frequently use when helping customers.
Keep these things in mind when designing your new storage warehouse layout: Frequency: How often do you use or need access to the storage warehouse? Size: Try arranging large products versus small ones for easy access without damage or disruption. Grouping: What products fit into a natural category and should be placed near each other? Labeling: How do you create labeling for aisles, bins, boxes, and parts? Arrangement: Organize items alphabetically or using another indexing system.
Match
Your product assortments in your store along with your storage warehouse shelves is a technique that has the potential to save hours of time during restocking. Additionally, it can enhance the transfer of everything non-inventory from standalone shelf space to wall-mounted shelf space, improving packing efficiency. It will also reduce the time spent searching for items that were previously homeless.
2. Set Up Guidelines for the Storage Warehouse
Once you have determined the layout style you want for your storage warehouse, ensure that your retail team can utilize and maintain the structure correctly.
Document your processes for all operations occurring in the storage warehouse, making them simple enough for trainees to use and readily accessible for all users. Build a prioritized list for every task that you and your team perform in the storage warehouse, such as: inventory checks, stock counting, goods management from suppliers, store restocking and seasonal reordering, warehouse shelf management, quality and safety assurance, product shipments and delivery, organizing packing and supplies.
Then, record the steps necessary to complete each operation or task using flow charts, checklists, tutorials, forms, images, and videos. Tools like Creately and Miro can facilitate this process. Answer the question of who should do what, when, and how.
For store owners busy with a thousand other tasks required to run their businesses, the time it takes to map processes may seem insignificant. However, by doing so, you save time when you go to the storage warehouse to retrieve a material or product. Moreover, with the entire team on board, the gains in efficiency multiply, and organization of the storage warehouse can be maintained continuously.
Lastly, consider how signage and commercial signs can assist in identifying product and material locations. But don’t overdo it – be strategic about what you use signage for and what you place on it. Keep it intuitive and simple without too many words.
3. Invest in Storage Units and Shelves
Part of what makes a storage warehouse successful is how the storage supports your workflow. Depending on your space and style, standard wire shelving may be optimal. It is preferred by some other retailers.
For stores looking to store many small parts and pieces in an organized manner, check out the hashtag #haberdashery on Instagram. You’ll find a plethora of ideas on how to achieve a storage style stemming from the British term for sewing supplies like buttons, zippers, and thread. It’s a storage style that has swept into the interior design world with its beautiful, natural, and quasi-pharmaceutical aesthetic.
Organizing a storage warehouse can be a balance between what makes the most sense for your space, your workflow, your budget, and your stock growth.
Choose adjustable shelving that can grow with your business. Look at all aspects of your business, from expansion to shipping and delivery. What types of storage systems will work best for your store throughout the year and in the long run?
4. Hold an Organization Day for Your Storage Warehouse with Your Team
When it’s time to reorganize your storage warehouse, hold an organization day to engage your team in the reorganization process. Order food, pay for overtime, and make it a fun environment.
Embracing and managing change may seem like lofty initiatives, but they should be on every retailer’s agenda when making significant changes to their storage warehouse.
If redesigning your storage warehouse comes with additional changes to business processes – which may happen if you follow advice number 2 – then adaptation will be crucial. And in many cases, resistance will follow.
So,
Involve the people who will participate in implementing the new processes daily. In fact, empower them to provide suggestions and improvements for the workflow during the warehouse redesign phase.
Obtain your team’s approval and endorsement before announcing a major redesign of the warehouse. And learn about the important principles of change models, such as Jeffrey Hiatt’s ADKAR model (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) – a five-stage framework for successfully navigating business changes.
5. Set Warehouse Key Performance Indicators
Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tends to align with best practices in inventory and warehouse management, but the storage warehouse and inventory are inherently interconnected. The way you manage your storage warehouse directly affects your knowledge of inventory and product counts.
Do you have inventory management systems in place? If not, setting up these systems is a step that needs to be taken before organizing your business warehouse.
The workflow of the storage warehouse is affected by how efficiently you receive, unpack, store, label, organize, and input goods into your point-of-sale system, sell products, and restock items.
KPI metrics for the storage warehouse should blend with your current inventory management goals and metrics. Tracking the storage locations of items in the storage warehouse is one way to add visibility to your current inventory data.
6. Assign Responsibilities to Your Warehouse Team Members
Create and assign responsibilities for your retail store team if you want your new organizational methods to sustain. Remember: involving employees and encouraging team buy-in is a critical part of the ongoing success of warehouse management.
Whether you hire a dedicated warehouse assistant or split tasks among your current team, regular maintenance of the storage warehouse avoids massive shifts and reorganizations at the end of the quarter or year.
Some ongoing tasks we recommend assigning for warehouse maintenance include: organizing bags and packing materials, taking inventory of incoming materials and consumables, performing counts and weekly inventory checks, counting product shipments and inputting them into the POS system, ensuring products are properly placed and shelves are checked, managing warehouse procedures and ensuring compliance among the team, receiving goods from suppliers and processing them into inventory, supervising customer deliveries and shipments, running weekly KPI reports and presenting them to the team.
These responsibilities will help your store operate more smoothly and prepare you for success when it comes to organizing and maintaining the storage warehouse. Without a person or a group of people dedicated to executing these daily tasks, your storage warehouse can quickly become a mess of materials, paperwork, products, and boxes.
To maintain organization once the new organization is complete, set up incentives for your team to achieve warehouse goals. Whether it’s additional opportunities for rewards, a simple paid outing, or lunch, reward your team for taking on extra responsibilities and achieving your goals.
7. Keep It Clean
You’ve invested time, energy, resources, and money in achieving a more organized storage warehouse. The next challenge is to keep it clean and organized.
Involving your team in regular checks and process changes is a great way to continue evolving and improving your storage warehouse processes. Anchoring is the key element for sustaining change, as we learned from the ADKAR model above, so keep training and holding warehouse management meetings to ensure your team is aware of what’s required.
5 Additional Warehouse Management Ideas
Once you have systems in place to organize your storage warehouse, there are some small tweaks designed to make the process of locating inventory easier, faster, and more efficient.
Keep Best Sellers Up Front
We previously mentioned how an organized storage warehouse makes it easy to find goods. The process should be quick if you are leaving customers on the sales floor while you search for inventory. If you leave them for too long, you may lose their interest and they might leave the store empty-handed.
Make
The process of searching for a product is quicker by placing the best-selling products near the entrance of your storage warehouse. This way, you won’t need to run around a large storage warehouse to find popular items. Even 20 fewer steps make a significant difference.
Create a Workspace in Your Storage Warehouse
If you offer buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS), local delivery, or curbside pickup for shoppers, create a dedicated workspace in your storage warehouse for selecting and packing those orders.
Take it from Best Price Nutrition, a retailer with a 14,000 square foot warehouse. E-commerce manager John Frigo says: “We organize our warehouse by brand. However, we have a range of products that make up a large portion of our sales. We keep them next to the packing tables because they account for about 30% to 40% of our orders.
Having these items on our packing tables saves us time when processing orders instead of running around the warehouse with carts to pick up these items, and it speeds up our order fulfillment process.”
Keep Your Storage Warehouse Well-Lit
No one should need to use a flashlight when navigating your storage area. Invest in high-quality lighting – energy-efficient LED bulbs – have their benefits.
First, retail employees can clearly see the differences between two items, so you don’t end up with a pile of mismatched items. Coming out of the storage warehouse with a blue shirt when a customer ordered a black shirt doesn’t make for a great shopping experience. It also doesn’t help when you refill your entire stock of ripped jeans because you thought the pile was running low, when in reality, you just ran out of the skinny size.
Additionally, well-lit warehouses can deter employees from stealing stock. It’s harder to commit theft if they’re stealing goods in the daylight. Getting Rid of Old Inventory
Your storage warehouse can quickly become a chaotic mess if old inventory clutters the storage space. Returned goods, damaged products, and out-of-season items should take up minimal space (if any), leaving more shelves for products that customers will buy.
Have a designated section for old inventory and work to keep its size minimal. Here’s how you can get rid of old inventory without throwing it in the trash: Donate it: Support your community by donating clothing, packaged goods, and books to local shelters. Many of them may even accept food that has passed its sell-by date. Run a clearance sale: If there’s anything that will entice shoppers to visit your store, it’s the promise of getting a deal. Discount prices and hold a “flash sale” to extract revenue from old inventory. Bundle it: Pair old inventory with new inventory to move it out of your storage warehouse. If your candles typically sell for $10, for example, create a $15 bundle – with the latter being a product that clutters your storage warehouse. Invest in Inventory Management Tools
Inventory management software exists to make your life easier – to the extent that Stephen Light, CEO and co-owner at Nolah Sleep, says: “Investing in inventory management software is one of the best moves a retailer can make to track and organize inventory.”
One thing this software helps with regarding organization is implementing a labeling system, which if done manually can be tedious and leave plenty of room for error. Giving each product a barcode label eliminates many errors and helps keep everything organized in two ways: physically and digitally. – Stephen Light, CEO and co-owner at Nolah Sleep
To make
The new inventory management system works for your store, develop an inventory tracking procedure. Prevent overstocking or old inventory, and gain valuable insights into the performance of your storage warehouse for your business, through techniques like: assigning SKU code, RFID technology, barcode.
The best part? POS systems like Shopify POS can integrate actual inventory and warehouse management tracking into one system. Stores have a better chance of knowing which data is most valuable if it’s easily accessible and stored in one place.
Wherever possible, we recommend others to rely on technology like inventory management systems to make life easier. It also reduces the chances of human error, which is quite high when warehouse workers feel bored or disengaged. – Diarish Modi, founder and owner of Socks Mad
Organize your retail warehouse
Retail warehouses are not static. They are highly dynamic places with many moving parts. Think about ways you can create empty spaces to increase inventory and business growth to avoid congestion and the daunting stockpiling of inventory.
This article was originally written by Cameron Jenkins and updated by Elise Dobson.
Combine your inventory management with Shopify
Shopify POS helps you manage inventory in the warehouse and retail store from the same backend. Inventory quantities are automatically synced in Shopify when products are received, sold, returned, or exchanged online or in-store — no manual reconciliation is necessary.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/retail/stockroom-organization
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