27 Warehouse Design Layout Principles

Warehouse Design Layout

Do you know what constitutes a good warehouse design layout? Do you know what are the factors that have to be considered during the layout design? Below are some points that have to be considered at the beginning of the design stage.

Storage

Accessibility of inventory

• Different operations require different level of accessibility to inventory. Do consider this during the warehouse design.
• For example, in FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) industry with less SKU variants and high volume, pallets can be placed in Double Deep racking. It is not required to access to every pallet.
• In high tech goods, where every SKU has to be accessible, conventional selective racking is preferred.

Air space utilization

• Poor air space utilization is often seen in an operational warehouse.
• During the design stage, for the ease of calculation, the beam height for every level of the rack is set to the maximum height recorded of the pallet.
• As such, because majority of the pallets do not require such height, the beams become too high.
• For a good warehouse design, the beam heights for each level should be considered during the design phase. This will maximize the vertical space usage.

Pick Face consideration

• Do consider the number of pick faces required at the initial stage.
• Pick faces are bin locations where pickers will pick the inventory given the pick order list.
• Insufficient pick faces will result the pickers to get the inventory from higher levels or more inaccessible locations. This will inevitably slow down the entire picking process.

Variety of storage medium

• Different inventory profile will require different storage medium.
• For example, fast moving SKU with small quantities picked are normally stored in shelving/ flow racks to facilitate ease of picking.
• Slow moving pallets, on the other hand, are stored in racking that has high storage density.
• If space is a constraint, automation can be put in place to fully utilize the area. There will also be improvement in the picking productivity.
• The miniload crane from Schaefer is one such example of automation.

Create a “hot-pick” zone

• A specialized area dedicated for fast moving items can be included during the design phase. Usually, this area has a high concentration of pickers fulfilling orders.
• To account for the picking productivity, you should look into the size of this area, the storage medium required, the suitable MHE (material handling equipment) etc.

Minimize multiple SKU in a bin location

• Sufficient storage locations should be a requirement during designing.
• Try to minimize the situation of placing multiple SKU in one bin location.
• An optimal warehouse should have 80% utilization rate for the storage aspect when in operations.

Material

Pick paths

• You have to know how the pickers perform picking of inventory in the storage area.
• What are the possible paths they need to move within the warehouse, e.g. zig-zag, front to back?
• This ties in to the slotting and placement of the inventory in the bin locations.

Minimum handling of inventory

• Avoid unnecessary handling of inventory, especially moving the products from one area to another manually.
• More touch points implies more time and effort required to process the product.

Material flow consideration

• Ensure that material movement within the warehouse is smooth.

Minimize congestion and traffic flow

• Eliminate the possibility of bottleneck point that cause a deadlock in the movement of MHE.

Minimize travel distance

• Large percentage of time is spent by pickers on travelling.
• Reducing travel distance will indirectly reduce the time to move around the warehouse.

Usage of conveyor for inventory transportation

• Rather than manually moving the products around, you can explore the possibility of utilizing a conveyor system.
• In the long run, it will be beneficial if the layout does not change much.

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