The Inventory Story
After one week of effort we’re beginning to see progress on our inventory project. There are about twenty sea cans (or shipping containers) located on CEML’s property and the contents of these have not been well documented. We started with container No. 6, which contains mostly donations from Samaritan’s Purse and these are primarily items that don’t expire and include such things as clothing, blankets, pads, and gloves. There proved to be about 500 boxes in that container alone.
Bethany created a system on her computer using a spreadsheet to organize the contents of each box in the container, and fortunately most of the SP boxes identify their contents on the outside labels so it doesn’t require a lot of knowledge on our part to correctly identify the contents. We also created our own labels to place on each box as it was added to the inventory as a means of identifying and locating them. In that container almost all the contents were sorted onto palettes, however, it’s not a given that there will be palettes in every container.
We have just started on container No. 12 which is packed full! It has no palettes and is stacked almost to the ceiling with no corridors between boxes. Dr. Sam Fabiano is overseeing our work and he has identified five containers in total that most need to be inventoried and so those are our focus.
We have two more weeks to work on this project, hopefully we can complete all five containers but even if we don’t we will be leaving behind our categorization system and CEML is hiring a new staff person specifically to maintain the inventory. We hope our efforts will be a great assist to them.
Michael Hoskin
