If you’ve reached the stark realisation that your storeroom never tends to be anything less than a disaster…well, you can at least find comfort from the fact that you are far from alone. Perpetually untidy storerooms represent one of the most common of all problems faced by smaller retail businesses up and down the country. Not that this kind of information is particularly helpful, but still – it’s always good to know that is not just you!

As it is the case with most things, figuring out the solution to your problem means first identifying the cause. More often than not, storerooms that are always untidy can be attributed to one or more of a handful of underlying issues – most of which are easy to address.

So if you’d like to take back control of your own storeroom, here’s a quick rundown of five possible reasons why for the time being it is constantly messy:

1 – You Haven’t Assigned the Necessary Duties

First and foremost, you cannot simply assume and expect that your employees will have the drive or the inclination to keep the place clean and tidy on your behalf. The reason being that unless specific duties are assigned, it is pretty much the norm for members of the workforce to assume that it is the responsibility of someone else to take care of tidiness. Simply by assigning specific duties and ensuring they are carried out, you’ll probably find the problem easy to correct.

2 – Your Shelving Is Inefficient

It could also be that the current shelving system you have set up is entirely inefficient for your business. In so many instances, an incredible amount of space goes to waste simply due to the storeroom having been set up with entirely inefficient shelving. In this instance, it’s a case of taking a look at just how much space is being used for the storage and how much empty space there is that could be made better use of with upgraded shelving.

3 – Your Layout Is Inefficient

The same also goes for the very layout of your warehouse – how you have the place set up will always make a difference to orderliness. For example, if your most popular items are not grouped together and easy to access, this will result in a storeroom that is almost constantly chaotic. Take a step back from things and carefully consider how things are laid out, in order to make things more efficient where possible.

4 – You Have Too Much Inventory On-Hand

If you have an unnecessary amount of inventory on hand at any one time, it is largely inevitable that your storeroom is going to come across as cramped, cluttered and untidy. This also represents a generally inefficient way of running a business from the get go – excessive on-hand stock never been a particularly positive thing. So once again, it’s a case of thinking carefully about your most popular and unpopular lines, in order to work out when you can get away with cutting things down a little…or a lot!

5 – You’ve Outgrown It

Last but not least, there’s always the very real possibility that you have simply outgrown your storeroom and could do with thinking about relocating to larger premises. Well, that or making use of a third party warehousing and logistics service provider, which could potentially make a huge difference to the efficiency and performance of your business.