Designing Warehouse Layouts: What do you need to know?
Warehouse layout design plays a vital role in operations and requires knowledge and understanding of diverse domains along with the accessibility of areas. It can be a complex task to lay out warehouse design concepts or plan both external and internal space of the faculty. Whether you are creating your own warehouse design layouts or consulting with a professional there are few things that you may need to know to create a strategy for an organized and optimized facility.
- Stock level
It is essential to keep a balance between customer fulfillment and demand as well as meeting the minimum storage cost. Your layout design must include product volume and stock level as the primary design consideration. - Principles for maximum utilization
When creating a design plan you need to make sure to utilize the warehouse storage space. The accumulation of the SKUs must be against the warehouse storage space. - Product and inventory rotation
There will be continuous inflow and outflow of inventory and products into and out of warehouses. It can be difficult to layout or design warehouse plans without the number or inflow and outflow which means you will have to determine how often in a given period time the products have to be replaced in the inventory. - Material handling equipment and machinery
It is essential to analyze the dimensions and types of each material handling equipment that will be required for the efficient operation in the work area. The transport, loading or products and storage management capacity must be considered before finalizing the layout of the warehouse. - Human resources
Together with the material handling and resources you must also consider human resources when designing the warehouse layout. The large storage space will be of little use if the organization will not have sufficient capacity to count on.
Top 7 warehouse layout optimization tips.
Warehouse layout optimization can be referred to as the redesign process of the distribution of the facility with the motive of maximizing available space and streamlining the operations that are taking place in it. Here are top 7 warehouse layout tips that you may want to consider:
- Analyze and identify current warehouse layout: The first thing to consider for optimizing the warehouse layout is to identify and analyze issues in the current warehouse facility. Understanding the warehouse inefficiencies that need to be resolved is necessary to evaluate the opportunities for potential structural change and making sound decisions.
- Product requirements: It is important to analyze the type of product that is being stored in the premises as it can also affect the layout due to its characteristics.
- Storage systems: You must choose the right storage systems to leverage space in your warehouse while also maximizing the productivity of the operations. You can choose between an automated or manual storage system.
- Mark warehouse areas: Since different areas will have to be allocated for specific jobs, mark the areas to ensure optimal flow of operation and movement.
- Deploy a WMS: Digitizing your facility helps in the optimization of your layout as it distributes the materials in the warehouse based on algorithms and rules.
- Leave space for future growth: Either it’s for redesigning or for the optimization of facilities it is crucial to take the organization’s future prospects into consideration. The warehouse facility must meet the present as well as future needs of the organization.
- Implement yard management: Yard management includes analyzing and monitoring the activity at the loading docks in the logistics staging area. This will help to improve transportation vehicle flow and avoid bottlenecks in warehouse inflows and outflows.