How to organise a warehouse: 5S warehouse organisation, shelf layout and labelling

On the night shift a line stops and the maintenance team rushes to the spare parts warehouse. There are pallets in front of the door, opened boxes in the aisle and unlabelled bags on top of the shelves. The seal they need cannot be found in five minutes; it turns up two shelves along, in another part’s box. Meanwhile the records say that seal is in stock. Disorder in the warehouse does not just waste time; it leads to the wrong item being taken, the same item being ordered twice and breakdowns lasting longer. In this article we explain how to organise factory and spare parts warehouses, how the 5S approach applies to a warehouse and how physical order is completed with orderly records.

Warehouse organisation means setting up the warehouse’s space, shelves, items and markings in a planned way so that the location of every item is known, it is easy to reach and it can be moved safely. It has two sides: physical order (space, shelves, labels) and order in the records (item codes, movements, counts). If the two are not set up together, one undermines the other.

What should warehouse organisation look like? Basic principles

• The flow should be one-way. Goods receipt, inspection, storage and dispatch areas should follow each other along a route that does not cross itself.
• Frequently used items should be close and easy to reach. A part taken once a month and a consumable taken every day should not be the same distance away.
• Heavy items on lower shelves, light items on upper shelves. This makes handling easier and reduces the risk of items falling.
• Separate materials should be kept in separate areas. Damaged items, items awaiting return and items to be scrapped should not mix with sound stock.
• Aisles should stay clear. Temporary areas for leaving pallets or boxes should be defined, so the aisle does not turn into storage space.
• Every item should have a place. If the place is unclear, the item goes on the first empty shelf, and a few weeks later nobody knows where it is.

5S warehouse organisation: step-by-step implementation

5S is a workplace organisation approach that originated in Japan. It takes its name from five Japanese words that begin with “S”. Applied to a warehouse, it works like this:

Sample implementation plan for the first week

In the spare parts warehouse of a mid-sized factory, it is more realistic to start with a single aisle than to roll 5S out across the whole warehouse at once. The flow below fits into one week with a small team:

1. Day one: Choose the aisle, take before-and-after photos and assign a responsible person.
2. Day two: Sort. Move items that have not moved for a long time, are broken or have an unclear owner to a separate area and compare them with the records.
3. Day three: Assign places to the remaining items, mark shelves and bins, and label the item codes.
4. Day four: Clean, clear the aisle and mark the temporary drop-off areas.
5. Day five: Compare the shelf with the records; note the differences and hang the weekly checklist at the entrance to the aisle.

Once the aisle has settled, the same flow is applied to the next one. This way the team learns what works at each step, and order is built step by step without closing the warehouse. In the first aisle, sorting usually takes the most time, because decisions have to be made about items kept “just in case”. Decide at the start who has the authority to make that call.

Factory warehouse organisation: space and shelf layout decisions

Factory and spare parts warehouses have a wide variety of items and irregular consumption. That is why layout decisions are made according to the characteristics of the item:

• Keep raw materials, semi-finished goods, spare parts, consumables and finished goods in separate zones.
• Group spare parts by machine or machine group, so a maintenance technician finds the parts for the relevant machine in one place during a breakdown.
• Keep critical spare parts that stop production on a separate, visible shelf, with a sign showing they are critical.
• Store small parts (seals, bearings, screws) in lidded, labelled boxes and heavy parts on pallets.
• Place fast-moving consumables (gloves, tape, oil) in the area closest to the exit.
• If space is tight, think vertically; but put only rarely picked items on high shelves.

How do you label a warehouse?

1. Give every item an item code; the same item should have one code and one name.
2. Write the item code and name legibly on the shelf, bin or box.
3. Set a single naming scheme for a zone or shelf row (for example zone letter, shelf number, bin number).
4. If possible, also print the item code as a barcode; counting and movement recording become faster.
5. Fix the label position: always the bottom-left corner of the shelf, or always the front of the box.
6. Make it a rule that when a new item arrives, the label, record and shelf are ready together.

Why are orderly records needed alongside physical order?

An organised warehouse can fall apart again within a week. The reason is usually that records and physical order drift apart: an item is taken from the shelf but the issue is not recorded, a new item is shelved before it is recorded, one item sits in two places. Records are the memory of the order. If every movement is recorded and shelves are compared with records during counts, you notice early when order breaks down. A short weekly check is enough for this:

• Are there unlabelled items on the shelves?
• Are pallets or boxes left in the aisles or in front of the door?
• Do the items in the damaged and return area match the records?
• Is there enough quantity on the shelves for critical items?
• Was there any receipt or issue this week that was not recorded?

Where are Excel and paper enough for warehouse organisation, and where do they fall short?

In a small warehouse, a paper shelf map and an Excel item list describe the layout. The map shows where the shelf sequence starts, and the spreadsheet matches item codes to locations. The weakness is that the two are updated independently: an item is moved to another shelf, but the spreadsheet stays the same. As the number of items grows, the location data in the spreadsheet goes out of date and people stop checking it and start asking the warehouse “old hand” instead. When knowledge is concentrated in one person, the order goes with them when they go on holiday or leave the company. Having the same person update the shelf map and the item list, and processing changes on the same day, keeps a paper and Excel setup working longer.

Where KurumsalPortal fits in warehouse organisation

The Inventory & Warehouse Management module does not organise the physical warehouse for you, and it does not offer shelf addressing or picking routes. It completes the record side of the order: items are defined with category and barcode details, receipts, issues and transfers between warehouses are written to a single movement ledger, counts are verified against the records, and items that fall to a critical level become visible. This way an item with a barcode on its label is posted to the right item card; the barcode reader and hardware to be used are agreed during the project.

The module uses the same user and permission infrastructure as the other parts of the platform. If you want to bring the records of your spare parts warehouse into a single movement ledger, see the Inventory & Warehouse Management page; for the platform as a whole, see the KurumsalPortal page.