If you like to cook, you know how crucial it is to keep your main tools within easy reach—so why would you store your lumberyard’s top products in hard-to-access corners of your warehouse? 

Traditionally, many lumberyards have put products where they had the space to fit. They then relied on their staff’s tribal knowledge to get orders picked efficiently and delivered on time. But that won’t fly anymore.  

Many lumberyards are facing key players retiring and, without documented procedures, tribal knowledge is walking out the door. This can result in chaos leading to costly errors, late deliveries, and missed opportunities for profit. For lumberyards to keep up with the competition – including big box stores – they need to optimize their layout and processes for maximum efficiency and accuracy.  

>> How to Improve Warehouse Efficiency and Lower Total Cost of Procurement 

The Hidden Costs of an Inefficient Lumberyard 

Maybe you feel you’ve been getting by without overhauling your lumberyard layout. However, if you take a closer look, you’ll see the costs adding up. Here’s what a disorganized lumberyard can negatively impact: 

  • Profitability. Time is money, especially when your lumberyard depends on making timely deliveries. The more running around your team has to do, the more time it takes to get a delivery pulled together, which means less bandwidth available for other orders. Your sales reps could be knocking it out of the park, but none of it will matter if there’s a constant bottleneck on the floor.  
  • Customer Service. Imagine a customer inquiring about the availability of a certain product. If your layout isn’t standardized, the customer’s rep may have to ask someone where the product is kept. And that person may say that yet another person probably knows—except that they’re out sick. What could have taken seconds to look up is now wasting time in order pulling and loading for delivery.  
  • Efficiency. The lack of an organized and efficient layout creates a longer learning curve for new employees and increases the chances for errors, creating more paperwork headaches. A well-thought out layout with clearly marked bins, shelves and areas in the yard allows new staff members to quickly learn the system and get up to speed much faster. 
  • Customer Satisfaction. A disorganized lumberyard also makes errors and delays much more likely. Without a reliable organizational system to reference, the risk of miscommunication goes up, which can result in customers receiving the wrong products. This is especially costly when builders and contractors are on a tight schedule. It only takes a couple such instances to develop a bad reputation. 
  • Employee Safety. Disorganization can lead to aisles cluttered with heavy items. If the warehouse feels more like an obstacle course, your employees are at high risk of being injured by one of those items. And if they do get injured, that could affect everything from morale to overall productivity.  

Strategies to Optimize Warehouse Operations and Yard Layout

To optimize your layout, you’ll need to take a logical approach, invest in tech, and align your company culture accordingly. 

Efficient Product Placement: The Key to Productivity 

A good lumberyard layout is all about determining the right location for your most important products and building out from there. That means: 

  • Developing a logical standardized system that reduces reliance on tribal knowledge. Key products (your A and B items) should be placed closer to picking zones, while less essential products (C and D items) should be placed farther away. This will help you reduce steps and move high-demand items faster, increasing productivity and profitability.  
  • Flow and staging for efficiency in the warehouse. Once your products are organized by priority, your warehouse should be further divided into product-type-specific areas, with product staging lanes that make it easier to locate and correctly place items together.  
  • Product placement and staging areas in the yard. From there, your team can pull products from (for example) decking, roofing, and fasteners, and then move them into the same staging area to be packed together into orders. At BPI, we achieve faster turnaround times with fewer areas by organizing staging areas in the yard by delivery truck. It makes picking orders feel less like a fire drill and more like tributaries naturally flowing into a river that carries everything where it needs to go. 
  • Color-coded labels and bins for everything. Every map has a key that makes it easier to use. Likewise, your labels and bins should use an intuitive and consistent numbering scheme and color-coding (be mindful of employees with color-blindness). A good system will make it easier to accurately identify products, especially those that may look similar, and even help overcome possible language barriers in your lumberyard.  

A logical, well-documented organizational system for your warehouse eliminates the need to rely on individual knowledge about your lumberyard’s layout. When key employees are absent or leave the company, documented systems will maintain operational consistency. Building a comprehensive system requires concerted effort from leadership to floor staff, the long-term benefits far outweigh the initial investment. 

From Tech Upgrades to Team Buy-In: Making Changes That Last 

To determine and implement the optimal lumberyard layout requires two things: investing in warehouse management tech and leading a cultural shift within your company. A strong Warehouse Management System (WMS) can help you use analytics to identify the aforementioned ideal product locations. It’s worth the effort to conduct a thorough search for the WMS software that best suits your needs. 

Of course, even the best WMS software can’t do everything on its own. To properly leverage the tech and take its recommendations from theory to practice, you’ll need to get buy-in from your people—and if they’re used to doing things off-the-cuff, that’ll require a change in culture.  

When BPI overhauled its own warehouse layouts, we didn’t just implement the changes and force people to deal with them. We asked for input on best practices from our employees and then conducted companywide trainings on big concepts like teamwork, accountability, and integrity. Along with our newly structured workflows, the emphasis on culture focused on our customer experience helped the organizational changes really stick, reducing stress and increasing efficiency across the board.  

A Well-Organized Lumberyard Layout Leads to Bigger Returns 

Having a well-organized lumberyard isn’t about keeping up appearances—although it does look and feel pretty good. It’s about ensuring accurate inventory placement and pulling to prevent stockouts and other delays that can upset customers and costs both parties in added paperwork and lost production. It’s about making operations run smoothly so that people aren’t running around stressed, increasing the chances of damaging products. And it’s about never letting opportunities to drive revenue pass you by, no matter who’s out on the floor.  

To learn more about how BPI can help your lumberyard transform its layout, reach out to our expert team today.