One task I found that really taught me many lessons was the process of actually creating a warehouse. This was not simply making the building but taking a completely full area and turning it into a useable, working, productive business section. This was a very complicated and yet overly simple process that took time. This was originally at a company that sold old surplus gear and had stored 5 decades of old military gear in piles and massive cheap moving boxes.
When I first was tasked with taking a several thousand square foot room stacked to the ceiling with gear and making it a usable warehouse I had my doubts it could be done well. The process took a long time because hidden in every pile was simply money. All the gear could technically be sold and a profit made on all of it. Literally everything in the room was money that was sitting there. The first step was to actually plan out the idea of an end game. We wanted to create a working moveable shipping area and have a storage area for not only all the old inventory but also the new inventory the store purchased on a daily basis.
This meant first sorting the thousands upon thousands of items in the warehouse. This was a task I put multiple hourly workers on every single day. We created systems for going through each pile and sorting the gear. Each time we had enough gear to fill a box of the same items we would label and store that box in a corner. The process took about a year to sort through all the gear. We used cheap moving boxes to stack all the gear up and ended up throwing out hundreds of square feet of gear that simply could not be sold. Some things are too far deteriorated or not safe to sell and thus they were dumped. Each week we filled a dumpster full of gear for a year and then stored whatever was left. In the end we cleared enough space to begin construction.
The next phase was to create storage for each of the items we needed so we hand built shelves that reached the top of the ceiling and stored the average size boxes we were using. After each shelf was built we would then move the boxes from one corner onto it and then build the next shelf where the old boxes were. THis process continued until the end when it was turned into a beautiful working warehouse.
