You might want to consider some kind of self-adhesive label you can apply to the edge of each box as it comes into your building. As mentioned before these labels could list whatever field descriptions you think are salient to describe your product. You should be able to either have a local printer produce these or possibly find a service for custom post-it notes like this online.
If you have as many items to manage as you say then you obviously need to have some kind of shelving system to store them. Design your shelves like the grocery store. There is a reason they have labels over the top of the aisle.
It is a good that you are paying attention to materials management. Of all the events we have to manage materials are the only one that agree to be compliant. Materials will behave exactly as you ask them to.
Materials nominally run about 25 - 30 % of our sell price. The actual cost of material includes all the costs from the point of ordering them until they are all the way in the cabinet. This costs include storage & retrieval but they also include all the minutes you spend in the easter egg hunts trying to find them. A minute spent in retrieval costs you exactly as much as a minute spent in production and the cost of that minute comes out of same profit bucket production does.
If you want to lower your costs of material as much as possible you should start at the ordering process and try to integrate this into the receiving process. The boxes you receive may be really big and random in shape but they all are associated with a job. If each job is assigned a number you have a common denominator to compare as you are scanning all these disparate packages.
The problem with relying on vendor packaging is that they are all so random. Sometimes your crew gets trained to look for an item in a blue and white box but can't recognize the same item if it shows up in a silver box because your vendor changed suppliers or you changed vendors.
Each of your projects has a variety of parts that will be showing up but each project has only one customer number.
Sometimes the problem comes from not remembering to order the item. Sometimes it comes from not knowing whether or not it has arrived. If it hasn't arrived it needs to be bird-dogged because not having it in the building when you need it will cost way more than simply buying it.
Standardization is your friend.
Thoroughness is your ally.
Is easy to blow this off when times are fat but hard to implement when they are not. The Wall Street Journal right now is filled with stories of white knuckled CEOs who say they should have gotten costs under control much sooner or wish they would have paid more attention to the landscape shifts.
Is easy to blow off when times are fat.