Warehouse Design Group

Did Stay tuned and I'm going to tell you what they are. Music So the four tenants of warehousing design, I'm going to explain them to you and what they mean for your operation. So the first thing we think about when we're designing a warehouse is For flow. This is very important because as you design a warehouse, it's critical that the flow affords the best efficiency of that operation. And one of the key things that I would provide for is one-way direction of flow as a general principle. Once we've got that, then we're able to design the warehouse so that overall it can be efficient. We try and move the goods through the warehouse as effectively as we can. The second tenant is accessibility. Music Now by accessibility, what I mean is that we want unfettered approach to all of the goods in the warehouse. So everything needs to be accessible. We don't want stock hidden away in piles that we can't get to. We need it accessible so that all staff, all forklifts, all operators can go to that inventory and they can pick and pack it and move it as required. The third tenant is capacity. Now this one's very important and I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this one. Capacity is what you have in the warehouse. And also what is the net or the planned capacity of a warehouse? They are two different things and often we see that companies make mistakes in planning for capacity. So let me just show you for example, if I have a chart here, little graph, and this is time on the lower graph. And here I have the, say it's a 10,000 pallet warehouse, 10,000 pallets. Now if I look at the utilization on a percentage scale, we have 50% there, we have 100% there, and we have 85 here. For most warehouses, if I'm looking at a 10,000 gross pallet warehouse, I suggest that we plan only to have in about 85% full, so 8,500 pallets. Now just keep that in your mind because as time goes on, often it's the case that companies will increase the pallets and move them up The problem is that just approaching 100%, we start to about here, went into a gridlock situation. And this means that the warehouse can become unproductive. Now if I look at, for example, productivity, let's put that here, productivity, if it's ranging at the 85%, guess what happens when we start to ramp up our capacity? Productivity starts to ramp down. And what happens is we have this gap which I call the productivity deficit. So what that means is there's lots of opportunity to improve our operation. So the critical thing here is if you design a warehouse for 10,000 pallets, generally don't go beyond 85% in terms of net or planned capacity because if you do, you'll risk this productivity deficit and the gridlock situation. So that's capacity. The last item I just wanted to cover is traceability. And this aspect is really about how you manage the warehouse in terms of systems and control. It's important that everything we do, every move we make is readily traceable. So we need to have the systems, the operations and the procedures in place to make sure the warehouse operates. So when we're running through the design process, we need to check all of these items, flow, accessibility, capacity and traceability in the FACT acronym, FACT. If we've got all of those ticks in place, then we've got the opportunity of having a really good warehousing design and operation. Thank you.