My good friend Chad over at NJ Smart Homes & Theater (http://www.smarthomesnj.com/ – they’re awesome, check them out!) asked IES to help him out with creating more space at his shop in Pompton Plains. As we see so often with businesses that are just opening up shop, they start out with a conservative sized office/warehouse, and then sales exceed expectations (because they’re so good at what they do) and bam – they’re out of space.
NJSH&T had a few things going against them –
- Small warehouse space with lots of SKUs for storage of all sorts of dims (high value inventory items)
- Storage mediums that did not satisfy their needs
- Need for access to floor space with work vehicles to load/unload trucks
- Not enough storage space to hold all items (inventory not put away)
Based on those problems, IES put together an as-built drawing with elevations for the existing shop.
From there, we changed the storage medium on the left wall to 10′ tear drop pallet rack (provided by our friends over at HeadzUp – www.headzup.com), adding 3 bays and 5 levels, for a total of 15 shelf locations. The total storage space was increased by 179%! (145 sf to 405 sf). The increase in space allowed Chad and his team to consolidate and bring in additional inventory to allow for better product offerings to his clients!
On the right side wall, we were able to install cantilever racking to hold wire molding, large theater screen boxes, and other conduits etc. We were able to reuse the storage shelving from the original shop and put it above the door in the mezzanine area to store deeper storage SKUs.
Overall, we were able to accomplish the following:
- Better use of storage space on the left wall (179% better space utilization!)
- Increase the pick faces to allow for NJSH&T to bring in additional SKUs and thus more offerings to their clientele
- Consolidated pick space to increase productivity on daily pick runs for job assembly (4-5 orders per day)
- Label all of pick location for future utilization of an inventory system
- Create more floor space (by having a place to put everything now) to allow for ease of access of the work vans in/out of the shop for load/unload
Overall, the project was an extremely successful one! Can’t wait for NJ Smart Homes & Theater to continue to grow so we can do an even bigger install!
– AH