Recognize when it’s time to increase your business space

Three signs you need more space – and the consequences impacting your business

Some of the signs you’re outgrowing your space will be pretty evident. Working areas getting crowded, inventory and supplies getting more difficult to locate; everything becomes cluttered and disorganized no matter how often your team sorts it. Growing success is a mixed blessing: more business means more revenue and profits, but it also requires more people and the space required to manage it all. At first, you might be able to work with the building space you have, but at some point, you’re going to need to expand. You’ll simply need more room to organize and store everything. Temporary offsite storage is expensive and inconvenient. Moving to another location requires weeks or months of disruption to business – and considerable free cash to support the immediate extra costs.

A better, more cost-effective solution is to add to your existing footprint with the addition of a new adjacent steel building.

Increases in sales are placing a strain on order delivery

Effective marketing and sales activity produce plenty of leads and customer orders – orders that need to be delivered in a timely fashion to help build and maintain the relationship. Your production and warehousing teams need to deliver on the promises made. It’s about balancing sales demand versus operational capacity. With sales growth, the time to deliver may increase, indicating more capacity needs to be added. Space to produce, space to store raw materials, safe corridors to move work-in-progress around, larger shipping bays, and increased area to manage and organize the workflow. 

Production and warehouse productivity declines can be measured through the increased time to fulfil and deliver orders. It can also be measured by an increase in waiting times for distribution load-out, product shortages, longer throughput times and lower production levels. Customers’ expectations today have grown due to the faster delivery times and more catered shipping experiences they receive from the retail experience.

The consequence of losing production, fulfillment and warehousing space is that you will begin to lose customers because of delays. And you’ll begin to see an increase in the number of errors. As soon as your operational effectiveness processes begin to fail, the resulting mistakes becomes the surest sign you need to increase your capacity before it’s too late.

Inventory records are continuously out of date

Inventory counts are essential for both the sales and production side of the business. Sales teams need to understand what is available and ready for delivery so they can drive future orders. Purchasing decisions rely on knowing current SKU and supply levels with enough lead time to order more materials before they run low. Production delays are inexcusable. On both sides of the supply/demand equation, if warehouses and production facilities are congested and overcrowded, proper measurement becomes a challenge, producing inaccurate figures. Senior leadership won’t be able to plan and make decisions with precision. Disorganization will set in and soon delays are commonplace meaning all departments can’t find materials, record their levels or place replacement orders in good time. Customers ultimately won’t tolerate out of stock delays – they’ll simply place an order with a willing competitor.

You need to continually hire staff 

As companies grow, adding talent across the organization naturally occurs. On the positive side, adding employees means more sales are coming in and more people are required to handle both the administration and operations of them. However, if hiring new employees is due to turnover, it’s a sign that people are not happy – and working conditions (i.e., the ability to be effective and engaged in their role) are primary contributors to job satisfaction. As frustrations mount due to a lack of operations space (and the business consequences that come with it), personnel will express their discontentment with their feet. Turnover is a top indicator of poor management. As your company scales and changes as a result, the foundation that supports it must also increase to provide the people doing the work the space and infrastructure they need to do their job well. When employees begin to feel confined or restricted, turnover is the result. Good talent needs to be nurtured, rewarded and given the environment they need to perform at their best.

When you need to add more working space,
Summit Steel Buildings is ready 

No one knows more about your business than you. As a leader, you want to recognize the signs early before any financial consequences set in. it’s only reasonable to provide the working area teams need and enough space to properly store inventory and supplies so they’re easy to access. For these reasons, as your business grows, the intelligent cost-effective solution is to expand your capacity by adding to your existing footprint with the addition of a new adjacent steel building.

We’d love to work with you on your next construction project. Visit our Contact page and Summit Steel Buildings will provide you with a free consultation and quote.

About the author

Darren Sperling has specialized in the engineering and delivery of pre-engineered steel buildings for over 15 years and has experience in over 20 countries worldwide. He can be contacted at Summit Steel Buildings at (877) 417-8335, by email at darren.sperling@summitsteelbuildings.com or on LinkedIn.