As a small business owner, do you often lie awake at night wondering how giant companies stock their product? How their distribution and orders are performed quickly and often without error? With the help of shelving systems, of course! Installing the proper shelving in a distribution center or warehouse, be it big or small, is crucial in ensuring an efficient and safe environment.

Check out how some of the world’s largest corporations use shelving to keep stock in order. You may even find what your business has been missing!

Amazon

At a fulfillment center for Amazon, bulk storage racks inside storage mezzanines are used to house the millions of products listed on their site. Currently, over 20,000 people are employed through Amazon’s fulfillment centers in the U.S. alone! Mezzanines create room for lots of storage without crowding or the need to climb. This means the product gets pulled quickly!

Netflix

Netflix has incorporated both wire shelving and rivet shelving to sort through DVD returns and orders. By using wire shelving casters on the bottom of their racks, they’ve created a space-saving mobile aisle system that can easily be moved, added onto or re-organized.

So what does this mean for your small business? No matter how big (or small) your warehouse is, there’s a couple good lessons we can all take from this:

• Use the space you have: No matter how crowded your warehouse may feel, there’s always ways to rearrange what you have to make room. Use the vertical space to install mezzanines or bring in taller shelves to stack more products, and always look for empty space that could be given over to new shelving units.

• Stay mobile: Focus on using storage that can move with your team to help them get things done and find items more quickly, even if it’s shelves with wheels or gravity flow racks that can move products through the warehouse.

• Work with what you have: Similarly, knowing how to use your shelves will go a long way. Understand the capabilities and capacity of everything in your warehouse, and try to figure out how to use it to its fullest potential to save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort.

Sure, you may not have an Amazon fulfillment center of your own – but if you run your own warehouse carefully, you can still be successful!