10:46 – Ever since I can remember, I’ve used the 3D organization system for physical items. That is, I stack them, and simply remember which stack each item is in, and how far down in the stack. Although this is probably the most common organization system among scientists, college professors, engineers, and so on, it doesn’t work particularly well for what I’m doing now. The three science kits we’re currently selling contain a total of more than 200 items, and that’s only finished-goods items. If you break out the bill of materials, it’s more than 1,000 items. For example, the finished-goods item “Biuret Reagent” is a 30 mL bottle of biuret reagent. That in turn is made up of a 30 mL bottle, a cap, a label, tape to seal the cap, and 30 mL of the solution itself. The solution, in turn, is made up of distilled water, copper(II) sulfate, sodium potassium tartrate, potassium iodide, and sodium hydroxide. In other words, that one finished SKU is actually made up of 10 separate SKUs, all of which have to be kept track of, and many of which are also components of other finished-goods SKUs.
So far, I’ve been keeping track of all of this stuff in my head. And, if I do say so myself, I’ve been doing it pretty well. I just remember, for example, that I have 268 thermometers and 322 24-well reaction plates in stock, and when we built the last batch of 30 biology kits, I mentally decremented that to 238 and 292 remaining. Barbara gets annoyed with me when we run out of something, but that doesn’t happen often, and about 90% of the time it does it’s because an item is backordered from a supplier rather than because I forgot to order it. But, at age 59, my memory is a pale shadow of what it once was, and I’m trying to force myself to get better organized using traditional methods.
One of those traditional methods that’s been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years is to use inventory bins. So this morning we made a Home Depot run, and I looked at the storage bins they had on offer. I ended up buying 37 plastic shoeboxes with lids, which are stackable, chemical- and leak-resistant, a good size for many of the items we inventory, and reasonably cheap. I would have bought a couple hundred of them to get started–in fact we drove the Trooper instead of Barbara’s car just because we wanted more room to haul stuff back–but 37 was all they had.