Setting Up Your Warehouse

Each warehouse layout is different and depends on your type of product, space, and process. Chapter 11, "High-Volume Product Store," explored Neeps, Inc., in detail to see how it set up its current warehouse. With more than 10 years of experience under its belt, Neeps has found a process that is efficient and effective. If you are planning on setting up your own warehouse, reread that chapter.

Tip

Don't be afraid to ask other warehouse facilities or online stores about how they set up their warehouse. You'll be surprised at how helpful others will be. Learn from their mistakes and successes. Setting up your warehouse incorrectly can be costly, so this will save you a lot of agony.

Here are some considerations when warehousing your products at home and offsite:

• Space How much space do you need? Is there room for growth?

• Location Where will you place your products? In your garage, spare bedroom, closet, basement, attic, storage shed, self-storage facility, home office, rented space, or elsewhere?

• Security How valuable is your merchandise? Will you need an alarm system or lock? Your warehouse might or might not have an alarm system built in.

• Insurance Will you need additional insurance to cover your merchandise?

• Loading Will it be easy to load and unload your products? If you are using your garage as your warehouse, you can just back up the car and unload. If you are using one of the rooms in the house, you mostly likely will need some type of dolly.

• Loading ramp Does your warehouse have a loading ramp for your trucks? A loading ramp can be helpful especially if you are storing and shipping hundreds or thousands of products daily.

• Shelves and racks How many shelves and racks will you need?

Getting Help

Are you planning to hire help to stock, manage, and ship your products? If so, you need a clear and easy-to-follow process of fulfilling your orders. Your process should be easy enough that a seasonal or temporary employee can begin work immediately. Your product information should also have a location code. Just because you know by memory where all the products are located does not mean that your employee will. Having a step-by-step order-fulfillment process reduces the amount of training your new employees will need. A good check-in and check-out procedure will also reduce the amount of spoilage, missing, not shipped and stolen inventory. Warehousing positions tend to have high turnover rates.