Shelving and Racking Ideas for Small Warehouse Spaces

If your warehouse is smaller than regular storehouses, you may find yourself needing to be more creative with your storage solutions. If you have a lot of products in your facility, as you are a busy business with a quick turnaround time, it can be hard to find efficient layouts to increase your warehouse’s space. Your struggles will only heighten as your company grows and you find yourself running out of room that you already don’t have enough of. By enhancing your storehouse’s configuration, you can enable your warehouse to store more products while also improving the overall effectiveness and productivity of the workspace. BiGDUG has put together this blog to help you find the top shelving and racking ideas and tips to ensure that even in a smaller warehouse, all of your space is optimised.

The first factor in ensuring that you are efficiently utilising your warehouse space is to find shelving that is smaller and can fit where you need it. Examples of this compact shelving include narrow wire shelves, corner wire shelves and rivet shelving. All these three forms of shelving can fit into the most confined and cramped warehouse spaces. Expanding your knowledge of the different storage and shelving options can help you understand what type of spaces you plan on filling, alongside which shelves are the best fit for them.

When large corporations order in stock, it will most likely arrive on pallets. This can be easy for managers to understand how to store them, however, when those fiddly items that come in smaller quantities arrive, it can be difficult to plan where they should be kept within the storehouse without them getting lost or forgotten. This is where smaller storage can prove to be incredibly useful. If you have enough space within your facility to store a half-pallet rack, you can transform this into a form of storage for your stock that arrives in half-pallet quantities from your supplier. You can even do this for items that you have ordered less than half a pallet of! This will ensure that all objects are stored efficiently and do not take away any focus from your best-selling, more important stock.

Cross-docking is the practice of unloading materials from yourself directly to the customer or another mode of transportation, without the need for long periods of storage in between. This can be handy for your fastest-selling products or those that you don’t usually order a high number of. This method of transportation can help lower the over-stuffing of important inventory areas and doesn’t require much effort or extra spare space to implement into your shipping process. You can transform a specific area of your warehouse into a location for storing items that are being passed through the warehouse during the cross-docking process. This will allow you time to store and document these products without having to add them to the main inventory. Thus, it will prolong the time it takes to ship them to the customer.

If you find that you are struggling for space, more often than not, you will have locations in your warehouse which are underused and have spare space for new stock. You can assess your storehouse and look for storage solutions that you already have in place such as gravity conveyors. Instead of them taking up as much space as they would in their original form, you could install a mezzanine. This would then be placed on the conveyor so operators can still transport products whilst also having newfound space for inventory and storage.

Pallet storage racks are designed to create horizontal storage with multiple different levels, allowing a variety of stock to be stored in these areas. For small warehouse spaces, we recommend using narrow aisle pallet racks. This form of racking is an excellent choice for growing businesses that need that little bit more storage. Pallet racking is useful for opening up your aisle space and improving how you utilise your floor and roof area. This will deter operators from leaving empty pallets or litter on the floor as well as allow more room for forklifts to direct themselves through the warehouse. You will have access to every pallet within your facility and arrange them on this racking in whatever way you need.

Incorporating pallet rack mezzanines into your warehouse will help optimise all overhead space. Mezzanine systems have proven to sometimes double available floor space within storehouses, influencing an increase in production and worker efficiency due to them having more room to move around. As a result, this will improve turnaround time and the company’s order fulfilment rate. Adding a mezzanine is one of the most effective ways to increase available space without adding an extension to your building.

Vertical lifts help you store items in hard-to-reach or high areas within your warehouse that may not fit or be suitable to move with a forklift. These lifts can have their settings edited so they meet your warehouse’s height, speed, and load requirements. The benefits of using this machinery include reducing strain on your workers and lowering the risk of impairment on your stock during storage. There are many racking ideas that you can incorporate into your small warehouse, read out BiG BLOGS to find out more tips and advice for storage and improving workplace productivity.

If you have a small warehouse, getting creative with how you use this space and making the most of what you already have are two important factors in optimising storage. By incorporating a few of the storage solutions mentioned in this blog, you can increase worker productivity, improve the ease of access to products, and lower your turnaround time whilst maximising your order fulfilment rate. This will lead to your business becoming reputable and customers being impressed by the company’s services.