Warehouses, no matter how spacious or well-planned, always tend to have those little spaces left over.

Awkward corners, small aisles or gaps, ceilings that aren’t quite tall enough to fit things like pallet racking – they can all be kind of a hassle in any warehouse, but they can present an opportunity if you’re feeling creative.

These smaller spaces can be used to install more compact shelving and storage options, allowing you to maximize whatever empty space you have left.

Will these methods replace your pallet racks or existing shelving styles? No – but they could make life a little easier for your team when they need to put things away.

Using Smaller Spaces in Warehouses

Look for smaller shelving

The first step for making the most of your smaller spaces is to find shelving that can fit. Look for narrow wire shelves, corner wire shelving, or even smaller rivet shelving that can slide into cramped areas. Knowing what your options are for storage can go a long way towards helping you understand what sort of spaces to look for, and how you can best use them.

Think about the quantities your items come in

Most of the time, when you get items shipped to you, it’s typically in a full pallet, right? But for those items that tend to come in smaller quantities, it can be difficult to know where to store them without them getting lost in the shuffle of other products.

This is where small spaces can come in handy! If you have enough space for a half-pallet rack, you can easily use this for items that come in half-pallet quantities (or smaller) to help keep them easier to find and avoid taking space away from larger items that may need to be sold faster.

Create cross-docking space

Cross-docking can be particularly useful for any items that sell more quickly, or anything you don’t have the space to store in the general inventory areas, and it doesn’t require a ton of space to create. If you have a small amount of room near your main dock, set up some shelving space to create an area for cross-docking, allowing you time to store and document these products without taking the time to add them to the main inventory before they get shipped back out.

Look for areas with other installations

A lot of time, under-utilized warehouse space comes from larger installations that may be hard to work around. Look around your warehouse to find things like gravity conveyors that you previously thought took away too much space from other shelving and start getting creative! Install a warehouse mezzanine that could stand over the conveyor to let your team still move products while adding more floor space for inventory and product storage.

When you look for small spaces in your warehouse, always be sure to use your imagination, and look for spaces you might not have considered before!