Manufacturing Inventory Management

Before investing in our Big Steel Rack storage solutions, we recommend a few manufacturing inventory management best practices to ensure you invest in the storage solutions that best meet your needs. Follow these five steps for a leaner inventory management process.

1. Material Usage Analysis: Big Steel Rack recommends that you perform a material usage analysis to evaluate how often the material you have on-hand currently is used. Identify the slow-moving material that you have too much of and the material that you have not used in an extended period of time. This steel inventory management step allows you to get some quick space saving wins.
   • Consume, return, or sell any unneeded inventory.
   • Commonize material types or sizes for the most efficient use.
2. Required Inventory Levels: The next manufacturing inventory management step is to determine sheet metal type and sizes you need to carry to meet your customer expectations for lead time.
   • How many sheet of each type and size?
   • Max weight and material stack height of your sheet metal per pallet?
   • Evaluate the reorder level and reorder quantity.
3. Define Best Storage Solution: Now that we know how much storage space you truly need, it is Big Steel Rack storage solution time. We aim to help you define the storage system that will create the most efficient material handling process for your team. Considering raw material inventory, work-in-process, finished goods, and each piece of manufacturing equipment to define the best solution for your sheet storage needs.
4. Think SAFETY: Safety, an often-overlooked aspect of sheet metal storage. Our systems allow your inventory to be organized and stored vertically, eliminating the unsafe, heavy stacks of sheet metal on questionable wooden pallets. Also, this eliminates your team’s exposure to the sharp edges of sheet metal stored at ground level. Big Steel Rack aims to eliminate the risk of stacking sheet metal pallets by offering facilities our Third-Party Professional Engineer Certified systems that are designed and manufactured to meet all ANSI & AISC ASD structural standards.
5. ROI: Investing in our storage systems eliminates a significant amount of material handling time and allows you to increase your value-added manufacturing square footage by going vertical with your sheet metal storage.
   • Reduce the square footage required to store your inventory by 40 to 60%.
   • Reduce material handling time.
   • Reduce the number of stock out occurrences due to accurate inventory tracking.
   • Reduce the total inventory on-hand required over time.
   • Reduced expedite fees for rush delivering material for a hot order.

How much is your current storage method costing you?

Now, the fun phase—time to organize and consolidate your inventory. It is time to assign your sheet metal a location and allow your team to keep the inventory organized in a Big Steel Rack storage system. Please contact us if you have my questions about manufacturing inventory management. We look forward to hearing from you.