The often-overlooked killer of any operation is waste. In parts stores and tool stores, this waste takes two forms: space and time.
A storeroom, with little planning and indifferent pre-thought, will probably look uniform throughout – shelves. Shelves are simple to just throw into a room: leave a few aisleways and just fill it up! You have a uniform, predictable storage systems. The trouble is that your parts and tools are not uniform, and therefore, you are stuck trying to tweak the shelves to make them suit. You end up buying tubs or boxes for your small parts, you slap some MDF on the end of some rows and screw some hooks in and you feel good about it for a few days until you realise how long it still takes to pick your parts, the hooks start getting in the way as you walk by, you start spilling parts onto the ground while searching through your shelf tubs and parts start to go missing behind the boxes. 
Ultimately, you will end up with parts lost, parts across various locations, various parts in a single location, parts piled on the floor in front of other parts … the list goes on. Searching for parts and tools now begins to waste precious time, and the searching happens many times a day.
At BAC Systems, we realise that your spare parts operation, and your special tools storage room, are full of items of various sizes and storage requirements and, as such, you require different storage media to handle the variance with efficiency.
Across New Zealand, many parts departments have turned to BAC to provide Drawer Storage Cabinets for spare parts, but it is only recently that they have begun embracing the full range of options available to account for your complete inventories of parts or tools.
BAC Drawer Storage Cabinets offer a selection of drawer heights with adjustable internal partitioning. When using BAC Drawers, everyone, without exception, has noticed how their footprint of small to medium parts, or of their special tooling, reduces dramatically, as drawers don’t have any of the dead space that you find boxes on shelves have. This compression always results in faster picking times, due to less walking (it really accumulates to make a difference!), and users notice that their parts are better ordered and are less likely to be put into the wrong location.
BAC offers many different ways of incorporating Steel Storage Panel, with hooks, toolbars, pins and posts, that don’t end up blocking aisleways and minimise the risk of tools being dropped in a pile below the panel. In a parts store, you may choose to store wiper blades and V-Belts on such a system, and in a Special Tool Store, there are plenty of irregularly shaped tools that would suit hook-storage instead of a geometrical drawer location. Panel can be free-standing or within a cabinet or mounted on a wall. It can be locked away or open, perfectly vertical or reclined on a slope, and it can even be mounted on a pull-out vertical drawer. The panels can support a large load and are easy to reconfigure as your inventory changes.
Shelves are always going to be required, but they are best kept for storing boxes, large piles of mats, and other stackable or bulk items. You will always require more shelves than drawers or panel, volumetrically, even if you store more parts or tools, by quantity, in drawers, so, we always allow for quite a number of rows of shelving. Some shelving should always be place near the door, as fast-moving items, such as filters, oils, tool cases and other fast movers will be best positioned there, near some drawer cabinets which position a larger volume near the door. The rest of the shelving will then sit at the back of the store, holding the less-critical items.
BAC offers modular shelving, instead of racking or roll-edge shelving, as it is easier to install, can be individually levelled, can be easily relocated, and looks exactly the same as the drawer storage modules. A storeroom completely outfitted with BAC Storage modules looks uniform and clean, and contains more functionality and far more parts or tools, than a store simply filled with antiquated shelving. In order to ensure that the BAC Range can account for items of all sizes (panel and glass, for example), BAC Systems offers long and deep storage modules with robust long span shelves within – BAC has a modular solution for everything from small wedge fuses up to large ute-tub liners.
It you wish to increase the efficiency of your Special Tool Stores, or, if you are concerned that you are about to out-grow your parts store, contact the BAC Technical Sales Team to arrange a free on-site survey.