Warehouse space is not cheap. Indeed, the majority of storage leads to costs to your business including management, lighting, and ongoing maintenance. That is why you want to know some effective ways to minimize your required warehouse space. For a lot of businesses, this means reducing storage for packaging. Packaging can be one of the most space-intensive storage requirements, depending on the nature and kind of business, the size of inventory boxes, and the kind of material used.
How Storing Excessive Amounts of Packaging can Affect your Business
Aside from the costs of running storage space, your business has to deal with other issues when you store excessive amounts of packaging. For instance, holding a huge packaging inventory in stock makes it harder to retrieve the correct packaging. This can take more time to get the required items to your packaging stations or lead to items being damaged in transit.
Moreover, items stored in a warehouse for an extended period may suffer accidental damage. Even corrugated packaging can still get dirty, dusty, and damp even when stored safely. This depends on the nature of your warehouse and the frequency of the packaging lines being used. Also, it can be more difficult to check and forecast inventory which can result in your business running out of certain kinds of packaging.
How to Minimize Storage for Packaging
As the issues above can begin to impact productivity and business growth, you can implement the following methods to reduce your inventory storage requirements:
- Make your packaging inventory more efficient. A reputable packaging manufacturer can analyse the entire range of boxes your company uses and decrease the total number. They achieve this by combining boxes that have low usage into a single or reduced number of boxes that can accommodate several products. For most businesses, the 80/20 rule applies. This means 20% of the packaging inventory accounts for 80% of the packaging being shipped. However, the slow-moving lines must also be stored, even if they are just replenished one or two times every year.
- Decrease the packaging void fills. Usually, the void fill like foams, bubble wrap, and pellets can take up a disproportionate amount of warehouse space. However, these are essential items that ensure your product does not get damaged in transit. The question is whether you optimize your use of void fill or compensate for outer cartons not tailored to your products. You can protect your items by using custom-sized packaging designed for your product’s correct size and specification.
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