We have a tendency to buy office supplies, e.g. paper clips, pens, markers, etc… only to later find out that we have it in excess, that they were just in the corner of a closed cabinet or shelf.
This isn’t a major issue, but I’m also thinking there’s probably an easy solution. I was thinking perhaps just have open shelves so they would always be on display with no blind spots, or to just draft an excel sheet checklist of sorts, and just have 1 of our office staff do a monthly audit.
What do you guys do?
Thanks
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One way I’ve been around was having a well organized storage area with designated areas for each item and “kanban” cards with picture, info, vendor.
Stuff like paperclips came in a master case. If you took the last box, you pulled the card and put it in the re-order box. The card represented whatever quantity or a master case to order. The person that did the re-supply order collected the cards. When the stuff was received into inventory the cards were put back too.
Great idea… really novel.
I’m thinking about ordering a few of these open shelves (36" length), and order transparent boxes for the office supplies.
We’ve made an excel sheet with picture, info, and vendor like you, but the kanban cards would also be a great physical reminder!
Thanks
I think some sort of visual inventory is probably best for consumable type items such as office supplies. In a previous manufacturing life we had bins of parts, and if someone used up the first bin there was a card at the bottom/back of the bin that you tossed in a basket to be re-ordered.
If you are looking for a tracking system I’ve created a simple system for cases such as these. You can see it at AlpacaTrack.com. Though you still need some sort of notification/manual entry when the office supplies are consumed.
Thanks, I’ll look into it.
I was thinking the same thing, I was thinking about my younger days working in a grocery store, and being told that “noone buys shit from the back, you have to display it.”
I actually bought this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SD3ZM1F/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1. It’s on its way right now, but I’m hoping that if we can make it more visually accessible, it would be easier for whoever would be performing this basic audit.
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Nothing. I don’t have any employees whose time I want spent on tracking paperclips. Even if we ordered double the needed office supplies each year that’s such an insignificant part of spending it would be a very low priority if I were to rank projects to work on. Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of things my people could be doing to either increase revenue or decrease costs before even thinking about how much we spend for post it notes.
We’re looking at this as a starting point to better track the status of our inventory.
We’re a contractor with 9 projects currently, mostly for the military. We’re also located on an island, so the vast majority of our equipment and parts comes from off-island, e.g. China, Korea, mainland US by way of the Port of Los Angeles, Philippines, etc… and we use 3 different logistics companies with different tracking systems. We also have 3 warehouses in 2 different parts of the island as well. We’d like to think we’re very proficient at our job, but having a central system to organize where everything is at any given time, ETA, what’s been taken out and used in what project, etc… has been a bit challenging for us. We’ve never faced any major consequences for a few mistakes here or there, but we’re in an industry and project scale where our liquidated damages/penalty fees are in the 10’s of thousands per calendar day. We often joke that if we’re late by even a 3 day weekend, it costs us a new Porsche.
We start small and observe what goes on in our little corner of our office. The coffee runs out w/o anyone noticing, someone goes on a coffee run, oh shoot… did we run out of staplers? Well, Amazon shipments to us take 1-2 weeks, etc… Also, as everything on-island is imported, the office supply stores routinely charge 4-6x what you can buy via Amazon granted with a higher min. order qty.
I dunno… I don’t think is a waste of time, I’m certainly aiming to save time. It would be much more efficient I think for us to just keep a general tab on our office items just once a month (not suggesting we count paper clips one at a time, just a quick glance will do). We can just draft a quick checklist, and just checkmark “YES” or “NO” for replacements. Then I or any other authorized purchaser can just order once monthly for all the needed items instead of addressing each item one at a time when I’m told “Oh no, we ran out of instant ramen.”
I think it’s important to do regularly scheduled housekeeping. I’m pretty confident it will end up saving us time.
Thanks for your comment.
Only one person should be ordering supplies. Keep supplies in one space everyone knows about, have them check there when they need something and if it’s out or close to out, they tell the person who places orders. The coffee is not running out with no one noticing. Someone is using the last of it and doesn’t care enough to refill. If you use Amazon, just add things to the cart as they come up. Don’t bother with the checklist, it’ll be too hard to keep up with. Make it clear people should not wait until something is out to mention it’s out. We can all tell when something is running low, it’s everyone’s responsibility to help out here.
I agree. I think it will save you time, money, and space. Organization will definitely help you here, if you’re looking for supplies in the ONLY spot they should be, you won’t have an excess in a ton of random spots.