Blog Post #7

Another thing that I have done this week is help Oceanne improve its inventory, mainly at the Pinecrest location. The way Oceanne’s inventory was set up was a little confusing to me. At the Gordon Square location, there wasn't enough room for all of their Gordon Square products. The majority of them were held at the Pinecrest location. So when trying to find something in their system, it might say your t-shirt is at Gordon Square. Although in reality, it is at Pinecrest, but on a shelf that says, "Gordon Square." This then would require one of the managers to go to the second location and bring the item back.

I asked one of the managers why they couldn't just consider all of the inventory at Pinecrest part of the Pinecrest inventory. We looked into it and she figured that might be better. So after consulting the Gordon Square location, we worked on fixing the inventory space to be one whole collection.

During this time, we also worked on cleaning and reorganizing a large storage closet. This closet was one extremely large pile of random items. This made it hard to get items into or out of the space. 

Our first step in this process was to clear out everything from the storage room. This process alone took me and two other people half a day. Once everything was cleared out of the storage room, we could barely walk through the back area of the store. We had to place ladders and stools in the bathrooms just so we would have enough space to get around. This was a lot more overwhelming than I had originally thought it was going to be. 

It took us the whole other half of the day to rearrange the space and place all the items back in the closet or decide what needed to be thrown out. This very quickly made the space a lot more functional and I think that it will benefit the company in imense ways.  

The next step in this process was to work on the inventory. While this was not as difficult as the rearranging process, but ended up being much more time-consuming. I learned the way many of the clothes were stored was to roll them into one big bulk with around 10 shirts in them. I thought it would be more efficient to lay them out flat so you could easily see how many you have of each set and make it even easier to pull an item out for a customer.

Rearranging and folding these clothes took me and two other workers another full day. We created a new space for everything and created new labels to keep everything in its own separate space. 

Here is a before and after of the back room (I didn't get a picture of the storage room)...

I think that my participation in redoing their inventory system and reorganizing these spaces will help the company a lot in their day-to-day tasks. So far I think everyone is very appreciative of this and I'm thankful I was able to help them in this way since they have been helping me so much throughout my project.