Does your business sell products? If so, you need a place to store your inventory. If you have a lot of inventory, you may need the space a warehouse offers to keep everything ready to ship. 

That means you’ll also need someone who knows how to run an inventory warehouse to keep your inventory in order and processing properly. So what should that person know how to do?

Create a Safe Work Environment

Every employer must create a safe work environment for their employees. That is especially true in work environments where hazards are commonplace. Improper product stacking, improper forklift use, improper PPE use, and unsafe behavior while off the ground are all hazards that can result in serious injury. 

Ensure your inventory warehouse manager knows how to create a safe work environment to avoid common warehouse injuries. Not only should they know how to create a safe environment, but they should also enforce the policies and procedures that protect that environment.

Keep Track of Product

You can’t sell a product you don’t have, either because it’s been mishandled or because it’s been lost. The sheer size of the warehouse makes it easy to lose product. That’s why it’s essential to put the product you receive away in its proper place before you ever try to pull it for orders. 

Use barcodes and scanners to keep track of inventory locations and the pieces when you put orders together. Barcodes help create a unique identifier for each product in your inventory. Scan product barcodes when you move product around so that whatever happens to it matches what it says in your system.

Handle Product Properly

From putaway to sending it out the door, how product is handled matters. Even something like stacking it on the pallet poorly can cause problems. Bad stacking can damage boxes and make them fall more easily, damaging the product within. When picking products and packaging them to ship out to customers, use packaging products appropriately to protect the items in the box. 

That way the package and the product within won’t be damaged in transit. 

Running an inventory warehouse well takes a lot of work. Not doing it well may seem faster short term, but it will cost you time and money down the road. Make sure that whoever you have running your inventory warehouse is committed to doing things the right way, not just focusing on getting things done as fast as possible. Orders may appear to be fulfilled more slowly, but you’ll run into fewer inventory issues and your warehouse will run more smoothly. That will save you time and money in the long run.

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