3 Easy Ways to Store Car Parts

If you’re running a car repair company, supplying car parts, or are a car enthusiast who likes to keep and use a lot of car parts, you’ll need an efficient method of handling and storing the vehicle parts. Efficient storage, handling, and auditing is an essential part of most successful businesses. In this article, we’ll tackle some of the ways you can store car parts more effectively and learn how to keep your warehouse inventory accessible and well-sorted.

#1 Divide Your Warehouse into Subsections

Unless you’re just starting out and have a really small inventory, it is really likely that you have a lot of varied items that you need to store and keep track of in the warehouse. Haphazardly putting inventory in the warehouse and taking it out when you need it might work in the beginning, but it will cause you multiple problems as your inventory grows larger:

You’ll have a harder time keeping an up to date tally of the inventory items - this is especially true for an inventory of car parts. You have a lot of items: tyres from different brands, different oil for different engines, a lot of small tools needed for maintenance and repair. If you decide to store these haphazardly and without any longterm foresight, you’ll start losing track of some of the items.
Looking up items in the inventory will take much longer - imagine you need 10 of a very specific oil brand in your inventory. You don’t have an “oils” section in your inventory you can go to and search for that oil. Instead, you’ll need to survey your whole warehouse to see if you have that oil and where you’ve stored it. This makes operations take much longer, and they will reduce your efficiency and productivity as a business.

Taking all this into consideration, it is quite obvious that the most realistic plan to ensure you’re organizing your inventory efficiently is to divide it into subsections. You can have a section for tyres, another for car maintenance gear, etc. Sorting and dividing your inventory into subsections will take more time in the beginning, of course, but you’ll be more efficient down the line.

#2 Use Specialized Storage Facilities

Car parts have a lot of unique shapes and features, and this makes inventory management for car parts much more difficult than other items. For example, while you need to keep the place clean and dry if you want to operate a food inventory, you don’t need to worry about how to organize them a lot. Food boxes almost always neatly fit on shelves or can be stored on top of each other. On the other hand, it is impossible to fit tyres on top of each other and keep them highly accessible.

That’s why you absolutely need to ensure you have the necessary storage facilities, racks, and pallets necessary to keep your inventory tidy and clean. For example, if you were to store your tyres on top of each other, it’d be almost impossible to access the lower tyres, you would be wasting a lot of space, and you’d need to constantly worry about them not falling over. On the other hand, you can easily invest in racks for tyres and make more efficient use of your inventory. It is an investment that makes sense.

#3 Be Smart

If you want to keep your business lean and efficient, you need to pay special attention to your inventory. If you have a large inventory, it prevents you from risk-taking and using new innovative strategies because of the fear that the inventory will become a liability later on. This isn’t unfounded either - if you ever have a lot of inventory items that you can’t use or sell, you’ll sustain considerable loses. That’s why you always need your inventory efficiently stored. You can do this by using auditing and inventory management software that will help you assess your requirements and make sense of business data. This allows you to keep the most in-demand car parts in your inventory and have enough headroom to experiment and innovate.