A warehouse that stopped costing time it didn't have

The challenge

Margins were under pressure, and the company needed to use time as carefully as money — every hour spent searching for material was an hour not spent on value-adding work. In the central warehouse serving both the workshop and project sites, there was no shared standard for where material belonged, and anyone could help themselves to stock without it passing through anyone's hands. The result was concrete and costly. Project teams needing material urgently sometimes couldn't find it. Nobody had visibility on what had actually moved. And once a year, at exactly the moment construction projects are already under the most pressure, the annual inventory turned into a major time loss precisely because nothing had a fixed, known place — or a known owner.

Where we focused

We worked with the storekeeper and the workshop manager directly — the two people who actually run this space day to day — to rebuild it with 5S. Aisles were restructured, unused stock was disposed of, and what remained was organised by type, by standard versus project-specific material, and by frequency of use. High runners were placed close to the storekeeper to cut down on movement, and a Kanban card system was set up to keep minimum and maximum stock levels visible and respected, so reordering happens before a shortage, not after.

Just as important, the storekeeper's role was extended beyond storage to ownership: stock movements now pass through one clear point of accountability instead of anyone serving themselves. We also introduced project "cages" in the workshop — boxes of small parts and fasteners prepared per workstation, so material moves to where the work happens instead of the workshop team repeatedly walking back to storage. Visual management now tells the storekeeper when an order is needed, without relying on memory or routine checks.

What changed

• Yearly inventory time was reduced by 50%, measured against the previous full-year inventory — time now available for value-adding work instead of being lost once a year at the worst possible moment.

• Stock now has one owner and one point of accountability, replacing a system where anyone could take material without it being tracked.

• Searching time and unnecessary movement dropped for the storekeeper, with material now having one known place.

• Project cages meant material now moves alongside the workstation, cutting repeated trips to the storage area during workshop preparation.

• The system is still running today, sustained through Kanban cards and visual management — not a one-time clean-up that faded once the project ended.