Making Room
By Paula Zangari
Paula Zangari
I’ve read that sales of organizing supplies peak in January as everyone decides to get organized at the start of a new year. We’ve caught the organizing bug here at UCEC, too. One of my projects currently is organizing our warehouse and getting rid of obsolete and redundant equipment and supplies.
We’re carefully looking at each part and deciding what stays and or goes. In some cases, a part such as a circuit breaker has been discontinued by the manufacturer. We want our panels to have matching circuit breakers, not a hodge-podge of old parts and new. Interestingly, there is actually a market for discontinued circuit breakers and other parts, so we’ve been able to sell some of these older components.
Read more about our warehouse staff. Check out Pat Gallegos’ profile here.
Going through this process made me think that the lessons we’re learning in decluttering our warehouse could be useful to someone else. So, here are my tips for decluttering a large space such as a warehouse, basement garage or storage shed.
1. Assess the situation with care. If something is not working, broken or beyond dirty, throw it out.
2. Research items that might be sold on eBay or Craigslist. If something is worth less than the effort it takes to sell it, get rid of it. It’s not worth your time.
3. Don’t sweat every dollar. You just want to recoup a few bucks of inventory, not retire to the Bahamas.
Going forward, keep clutter to a minimum by looking at your inventory before buying new supplies and parts. You may already have the item you need! This is my big push for 2016: do we already have the part? Check before ordering. Make a second or third check if you need to. You’ll save money and time with this one step.
Paula is an Operations Support Manager for UCEC.