The squeeze is on — and it could be choking your productivity rate.

You know what usually happens when stock starts to back up when orders drop off.

Product starts dropping into black holes. Damage mysteriously occurs. Inventory comes and goes without proper paperwork hitting the books. It gets tougher to count units accurately.

Bottom line: The tighter your inventory space gets, the more inefficient your productivity will be. One chilling stat: If your already full inventory is increased by 7%, you can expect to see productivity dive by up to 27%.

Ouch!

Once stuff starts piling up in the aisles (often the first spot for homeless inventory), your workload can easily triple.

Instead of picking up one pallet or unit, workers must pick up one, move it, pick up the one they’re looking for, then put back the pallet or unit they moved in the first place.

That’s a mouthful and a headache.

There’s no easy solution.

You can:

• try to reconfigure your existing floor plan to accommodate overstock
• talk to sales or production about ways to expedite sale or use of more stock
• see if vendors are interested in buying it back, and
• try to document the costs and the outweigh the expense, consider making an argument for acquiring outside storage.

Tags: inventory, orders, product, production, productivity, sales