Warehouse Design

Warehouse design has three phases,

• Pre-engineering
• Engineering
• Implementation

Pre-Engineering

It is important to find out the strategy of the company, both short and long term. It could be a storage facility, or a cross docking facility, or a reverse logistics depot. The next step is information and data collection. After data collection, statistical analysis takes place. Taking all information, the first question is how much storage area is required.

Conceptual design

After the total storage space, one can decide how big this facility needs to be, and how much will it cost?

Layout planning

This includes the layout design, how much manpower is required. Then begin with the investment and the operating costs analysis of the different alternatives. Would pallet jacks or guided trains loaded with pallets will be used , or fork trucks to move the product? Economic evaluation of each operational design to determine the most economical should be done.

Trade-off principles

• Use the shortest path to move the products: the fastest moving goods are kept closest to the door because that reduces the amount of travel time to take out and put away inventory, and ship it back out again.
• Smallest space – The smaller the space that you can put the inventory into, the less the travel distance will be because if all SKU’s are in just one room, the picking is easy and travelling reduces.
• Less handling less labor – Labour costs reduces if less handling is involved.
• Stock groupings – Classification of similar items under one roof also helps.
• Longer run times –When picking a particular type of item, pick all of that item before going from one area to another.
• Balancing activities – Balance the time requirement for multiple activities like shopping, picking, receiving, and packing. Have separate people for separate activities like picking, packing and shipping.

There are trade-off regarding storage configurations.

• Floor space measurement on different applications -In most warehouses, traditional fork lifts and two types of storage – bulk storage without racks and rack storage with a lot of single deep racking are used. By going from single deep racking to double-deep racking or from a traditional wide aisle application to a narrow aisle application, the size and number of aisles will be reduced, therefore eliminating the square footage to each aisle, hence increasing efficiency.
• Height: The higher you go, the less square foot footage is required. The racking and handling equipment become more expensive and operating costs go up, even though the cost per square foot goes down.
• Economic tradeoffs: The cost of equipment, maintenance, labor, the total investment in the equipment and parts, and the recoverable or scrape value of that equipment are important areas.
• Flexibility and Reliability of the facility layout: In an automated system what happens in case of power failure or other facility related problems.

These are some of the factors that have to be pre decided before starting the engineering of the facility.

Engineering

Engineering includes where the aisles are going to be, where the racks are going to be, how much space each is going to take, and how can the whole space be optimized. Other areas are layout drawings, electrical, lighting and computer wiring requirement drawings.

To build or to modify

Next is to decide, small changes in the existing facility are sufficient or it has to be build from the scratch.

Operating procedures manuals

Detailed operations procedure should be layout. How will the layout be made, how many people are required, costing budgeting etc.

Implementation Phase

In the implementation phase, issue requests for proposals to equipment suppliers based upon the requirements. These will specify exactly what is needed, such as what the weight capacity must be, how long the battery has to hold a charge, etc. Then, review and analyze the responses from multiple vendors to decide for one.