Work has been very crazy lately. We are moving from a tiny, cramped shop into a large building with a massive parts and service area. Part of the process of moving is getting our department organized. For lack of a better phrase, our store has been chaos for the past few years. It’s not necessarily that we are that disorganized…but it’s the fact that we’ve so outgrown our current facility that we’re out of space. You can’t organize when your parts room is literally overflowing with parts.
This is problem that we’ve known we needed to address, but are just now in a position to finally do something about it. First on our agenda after the new building is built: we are going to get an entire new shelving system and we are going to be organizing our workspace with new plastic bins and storage containers. The ones we have now are cardboard and they’re pretty much all old and falling apart. The new, improved storage system will help us sort our parts department the way that we’ve wanted to sort it, but simply haven’t had the opportunity.
We have actually came up with a color-coded system using the new bins and it should be pretty easy to follow. We’re keeping normally stocked parts in small blue bins, organized by make and model. We’re building a shelf for customer special orders, where we’ll have bins with dry erase tags. Lastly, we’ll have a big shelf of yellow bins that have parts that our mechanics have ordered. I’m sure that system will change once we go to implement it, but it sounds so much better than what we’re currently working with…which is a messy mass of white cardboard bins with ten year old tags written in permanent marker.
I have seen the difference that organization makes first-hand through other jobs in my past, and think this will do wonders to help our productivity. Organization saves money, it saves time, and it can even keep employees in better moods if they are able to find what they’re looking for without wasting ten minutes every time they wander into the parts room. I know it’s going to be quite a challenge to get everyone to adapt to the new system. A lot of people have a tendency to get ‘stuck’ using the old system, unwilling to change, but I think once people see how much more efficient this is, they’ll be eager to switch.
