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The start of a new year always brings promise, no matter how challenging or chaotic the previous year may have been.

Most of us use the first quarter as a chance to recover from the chaos of the holiday season, and take stock of where our warehouses are and where they could grow over the next year. And while this sort of foresight is always necessary for a successful warehouse, there’s still work that could be done in the immediate future to help lay a good foundation for the year to come.

While every warehouse will have their own needs, here’s what we think your warehouse could be doing for the first quarter to make the rest of the year that much more productive.

 

Q1 Warehousing Tips

 

Review your storage placement

Over the holidays, you probably learned a lot about what your most popular items are, and how much trouble your team had getting to these items.

Even if your overall sales have slowed a bit (as everyone’s sales tend to during the beginning of the year), these figures can still help you plan your warehouse layout a little better. Rearrange your warehouse shelves, pallet racks, and wire shelving to help focus on the most popular items you carry, and address any other storage concerns your team may have – if one shelf is overcrowded, it may be time to help spread out your inventory onto other storage methods.

 

Review your inbounds

Similarly, the sort of items you’re actually getting orders for – and when those orders come in – are going to be a big part of how you plan the rest of your year.

Are certain items starting to sell again now that the holidays are over? Do you need to pause order on a few items that aren’t really moving right now? Did one of your logistics providers consistently run into issues during the previous season? If you’ve got questions or issues with your orders, now is the time to revise them before things start ramping up again.

 

File paperwork

Nobody actually enjoys it, but there’s still a lot of record-keeping that goes into warehouse management, and now that the holidays have settled down, you should take this opportunity to get it all sorted.

Prepare your sliding storage shelves for retention of hard documents (tax paperwork, invoices from vendors, etc), and sort out everything that should be safely shredded and disposed of. Once things get busy again, you’ll be glad you got this out of the way.

 

Prepare for spikes in demand

Of course, it won’t stay this quiet forever, and now is a good time to start getting ready for business to pick up again.

Do you have any sales planned over the summer? Will you be focusing on a certain set of products over the coming months? Do you need to work out anything with your vendor as far as delivery times for certain goods? Map out your next few months of logistical needs and get ready for the occasional up-and-down in sales.

Hopefully, with a few of these tips your warehouse will be ready to face whatever the year holds!

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