This is especially important in businesses like the grocery industry, where perishable goods have expiration dates. If you are storing bread or fruit, you don’t want the shipment you received yesterday to be put in the very front of the shelf when the shipment you received last week sits in the back, potentially going bad. Using a FIFO system, customers can improve their bottom line by cutting down on lost products due to spoiling.
At UNEX, we sell products for FIFO for carton flow and two-deep pallets. The alternatives to these solutions are systems of static pallet locations on the floor or static shelving. There are numerous advantages to using a FIFO system instead of a static one. For one, you can have people loading and picking simultaneously. In a FIFO system, loading happens from the back, and picking happens in front, so you can have somebody replenishing your shelves from the backroom while customers pick from the front. It is impossible for the newer products to be loaded in front of older products due to the rear loading. In a static storage system, loading and picking happen from the front. In a grocery setting, this puts your stockers in the way of your customers and often results in first in, last out storage.
Another disadvantage of static shelving is that sometimes employees can sacrifice quality for speed when stocking shelves. It’s much easier to push product that is already on the shelf back to make room for the new product than to remove the existing product, stock the new product behind, and then replace the older one. With a FIFO system, this is a consideration that does not have to be made. By rear loading, the product automatically slides in behind the existing product.
The grocery business is probably the most prevalent user of FIFO, but it is not the only industry that uses it. Many other industries, like the automotive industry, for example, are concerned with stock rotation and being able to keep track of what product was sold and when.