Recognize when it’s time to increase your business space

Summit Steel Buildings understands how operational and storage space is crucial. The consequence of limited space affects the entire organization’s activities – from production, fulfillment, customer experience, marketing and operations, every department across the organization. Before you explore adding more space by building, you first must recognize the signs you’ve outgrown your current capacity.

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. At some point, you’re going to need to expand. 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.

Three signs you need more space:
1. Increases in sales are placing a strain on order delivery
Effective marketing and sales activity produce orders that need to be delivered in a timely fashion. It’s about balancing sales demand versus operational capacity needing space. 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. The consequence of losing production, fulfillment and warehousing space is that you will begin to lose customers because of delays.

2. Inventory records are continuously out of date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 overcrowded, proper measurement becomes challenging and produces inaccurate figures. Senior leadership won’t be able to plan and make decisions with precision. Customers ultimately won’t tolerate out of stock delays – they’ll simply place an order with a willing competitor.

3. You need to continually hire staff 
Adding employees means more sales are coming in and more people are required to handle them. However, if hiring new employees is due to turnover, it’s a sign that people are not happy – and working conditions are primary contributors to job satisfaction. As frustrations mount, personnel express their discontentment with their feet. Turnover is a top indicator of poor management. As your company scales, the foundation that supports it must also increase to provide the people doing the work the space they need to do their job well.

When you need to add more working space, Summit Steel Buildings is ready
As a leader, you want to recognize the signs early before financial consequences set in. 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.

About Summit Steel Buildings

Summit Steel Buildings is a premier manufacturing and construction supplier in the pre-engineered building industry. Their engineering team provides full stamped engineered drawings for permit and construction across North America. They fabricate their commercial and industrial steel buildings throughout multiple factories strategically located around the continent to ensure they are able to deliver inland and to any port on the east and west coasts. Please visit www.summitsteelbuildings.com.