After an amazing holiday break we’re back and excited for 2024. This month around the plant we’re focusing on rearranging things to improve the flow of materials, and also to make room for a new kitchen/lunchroom and gym. Although our core business is printing we also do a lot of inventory storage, management and distribution.
From here on I ramble on about warehousing, inventory, and online portals. Interesting if you’re interested. If not – thanks for reading, get in touch for any upcoming projects, and we’ll be back in February with our next newsletter update.
As the space needed for storage has increased we’ve been steadily adding racking and moving things around but we’ve reached a point where we have to actually move some walls. It’s exciting and will result in smoother operations, the consolidation of the various kitchens/lunchrooms into one, and the addition of a gym complete with barbells, dumbbells, pull-up bars and more. Nikky and Vittoria have christened the new fitness space as “GymPro“. 🙂
To manage our inventory and fulfillment we utilize a number of web-based ordering portals. We’ve built these sites based on the specific needs of the client. Some are strictly an inventory-release system, others include the ability to download PDFs and other media, and one even allows for the ordering of custom-printed items! Right now are are building a new site that allows for the reserving and tracking of trade show booth material to be used by staff attending the shows along with the third-party company that stores and maintains the booth material – it will tie in to the users calendars, include images of the items being ordered, and assist in tracking overall utilization of the various elements.
Shifting thoughts to the racks themselves, as our business has grown we’ve often had to invest in racks based on what is available at the time we need it. Sadly this has resulted in a variety of sizes and colours for our racks, and as much as I’d like to see them all be a uniform size and colour that’s just not going to happen. But in spite of the various colours they mostly all work together in harmony. It is sometimes a bit of a puzzle to find the right piece at the right time but this overall re-arrangement should be it for a long while. We’ve also hopefully placed all the racks in positions that will not be impacted when we add another press in the coming year. More on that in a future newsletter.