Other Voices: Five novel ways to create more space in your facility

Editor’s note: The following column from Invicta Mezzanine Floors is part of Modern’s Other Voices column, a series featuring ideas, opinions and insights from end-users, analysts, systems integrators and OEMs. Click here to learn about submitting a column for consideration.

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Growth can be a bit of a ‘catch-22’ for an up-and-coming business. You’ve got so much work coming in that you need to hire someone new, but you need to keep taking on new work to be able to afford them. Then you end up with so many people that they won’t fit in your current premises - but you can’t afford to move without taking on even more. They’re good problems to have, as the old saying goes, but it can feel like there are no good answers.

If you’re struggling for space in your current premises and are thinking about a move, you might want to consider how you utilise your space instead. With some tweaks here, a bit of investment there and a bit of help from your staff, you may be able to create additional space where none seems to exist. Here are just five ways in which you can create more space in your facility, from mezzanine floors to living life in the cloud.

Compacting your storage
One of the most pressing needs for space is often in a warehouse or other storage area. Growth in inventory and stockpiling due to Brexit (or more positive reasons!) can quickly exhaust the available shelf space in a warehouse with traditional pallet racking. Switching to a higher density racking format could double your available storage space, or give you room to adapt part of the space for a different purpose.

The amount of space you can save will depend on the items you’re storing or planning to store. Narrow aisle or double-deep racking for instance can save a substantial amount of space by compacting shelves together, or storing items several layers deep, but these will not be suitable for all storage areas. However, it’s likely that by working with a storage specialist, you can devise a plan that will utilize your space more effectively even if you’re already using a high density storage solution.

Similarly, storage within an office space or more traditional working environment can also be compacted. Archive and document storage, such as may be used to keep patient records, contracts, plans and schematics and more is often stored in filing cabinets or simple boxes on shelves, taking up valuable space in store rooms or offices. A mobile storage solution can remove the need for aisles by compacting shelves together, and provide doorless solutions for offices, allowing filing cabinets to be used in tight spaces and thoroughfares.

Mezzanine floors
You may not have much floor space left, but have you thought about the air? Warehouses and other tall buildings often feature empty headspace which is otherwise being wasted, and may even be costing you money as it’s heated or cooled. These areas are prime real estate for mezzanine floors: flexible structures that can be raised above operational floor space, and can play host to all manner of activities and substructures.

Mezzanine floors are both strong enough to support applications such as offices and heavy machinery, as well as flexible enough to be dismantled and relocated in the event that you move facilities, or want the mezzanine to be located elsewhere. If you’ve hit the limits of your existing workplace but lack the funds or the energy to relocate, a mezzanine can be a straightforward and logical way to maximize your available space.

Going digital
If you’re dedicating a significant amount of space to document or archive storage, you might want to consider digitisation. An inventory of your physical documents may find that many are essentially redundant, or at least have no need to be retained in physical form. Any which no longer need to be retained as a physical object can be scanned and uploaded online, and could even be stored on an entirely free service.

Software exists which can transcribe these documents for you, turning them into useful and editable documents. Multiple people meanwhile can be provided with login details to access them anytime they need them, potentially improving productivity. Those documents which do still need to be retained could be put into fewer and more dense storage solutions, such as mobile shelving, or even stored off-site, depending on how frequently they need to be accessed.

Hot desking
By allowing people to work from home on some days of the week, you could feasibly have fewer desks in your workplace than you have employees to fill them. Employees who are in on a given day could rotate desks, a process known as hot desking. Employees simply pick an available workstation - similar to using a computer at a library or other public space - log in to the system, and have it retrieve all of their files from a server, ready for them to start working.

This style of flexible working is popular with many modern businesses, and working from home at least one day per week is considered an attractive perk to millennial and younger employees. With the ability to load up personalized desktop backgrounds, Spotify logins and even mood lighting or other decor when an employee logs in, hot desks can now have a personal edge too, making them more akin to a traditional workspace.

Multi-purpose spaces
Instead of having a meeting area and a recreational space, why not combine the two? By employing an element of home design and leveraging the creativity of your employees, you can create spaces that give you the best of both worlds. Meeting tables could fold up and can be put to one side and stored, or even adapted to play ping pong with temporary nets. Arcade tables meanwhile combine an attractive place to sit and meet informally or play games over a break.

There are all sorts of ingenious ways to adapt a space for multiple purposes, from hiding things in cupboards and fold-outs to simply hiding recreational objects in plain sight. A dart board cabinet could have a whiteboard on the front, for instance, or have messages pinned to it. Involving your employees in these creative design decisions and crowdsourcing ideas will help you to come up with a space that melds work and play, and gives you the best of both worlds.