Dealership Parts Room Bin Shelving for Ken Garff Hyundai in Salt Lake City and Sandy

A dealership parts department stores thousands of part numbers, and most of them are small: clips, gaskets, sensors, bulbs, filters and bagged hardware. The parts team needs every item to have one fixed home so the counter can find it fast and the monthly counts come out right. When storage is mismatched or worn out, parts end up doubled up on shelves, stacked in open cartons or stashed wherever there is room.

Ken Garff Hyundai wanted both stores on the same storage standard. The request we worked from for the downtown store was to redo the dealership parts room with closed shelving units, solid back and sides, set in back-to-back runs, plus drawer cabinets for the smallest parts. The Sandy store’s order used the same shelving and drawer system, so parts staff moving between the two stores would find the same equipment in both rooms.

At the downtown store the new parts room was also part of a larger dealership remodel, so the work had a real deadline: the manufacturer’s final inspection of the remodel was waiting on a finished parts room.

Representative photo of closed steel parts shelving, not the Ken Garff installation.

Loose hardware, clips and very small parts are hard to manage on an open shelf. Both stores received modular drawer cabinets with full-width steel drawers and drawer dividers, so each small part gets its own compartment and the whole drawer can be seen at a glance. The Sandy store’s cabinets came in two heights; the downtown store’s were a wider drawer unit.

To use the space above the drawers, each store also received matching steel storage cabinets set over the drawer units, with interior shelves and cabinet connecting hardware. That keeps the footprint of each drawer station doing double duty. Our modular drawer cabinets and industrial storage cabinets pages cover the sizes and options, and our bin cabinets guide compares locking bin storage for high-value small parts.

Illustration of a drawer cabinet with a storage cabinet on top.

The most useful part of this project came after the downtown install. As the parts team began moving stock into the new drawers, they found the divider set that came with the cabinets did not match how they had always slotted their small parts. Their old drawers used a taller divider, and with the new divider spacing a narrow strip was left over at one end of every drawer. The team had been storing seven rows of parts per drawer and was now getting six.

Drawer width on these cabinets is laid out in small, equal increments, and every divider size uses a set number of them. We worked with the manufacturer to find a mix of two divider widths that adds up to the full drawer width, so no space is lost, and supplied the added side-to-side and front-to-back dividers on a follow-up order. We also handled the remaining punch-list items, including the last top shelves and one drawer roller, with the manufacturer.

Drawer and divider photo from the project file.