4 Effective Ways To Plan A Warehouse Layout Design

Planning a layout of your warehouse is a fundamental thing of a Warehouse Management System (WMS) to make your warehousing activities become more effective and efficient. From the inventory management side to fulfill customer orders, your warehouse layout design will streamline your business processes.

To be able to plan a good warehouse layout, then you should have a better understanding of what you have to do to design a warehouse functionally and effectively.

Here are 3 key principles you need to keep in mind when planning your warehouse layout to be efficient, as follow:

a. Flow

The flow of warehouse goods movements can be summarized as moving the raw materials, people, and traffic in your warehouse. The first step you have to do is to reduce any high-traffic areas or potential cross-flow crashes that occur within the warehouse.

And that means, every activity and activity undertaken by the employee should be placed as close as possible to the earliest activity, then the next activity and so on. And that means the material used to perform such activities should be located as close as possible to each workstation. So the second step you should eliminate is the movement and distraction as much as possible.

b. Accessibility

Each product and all products that are above the pallet must be accessible to everyone, without the need to move a single product that prevents them from achieving the product.

That means setting up your pallet shelves in a row wide enough to accommodate the use of pallet Jack and Lift trucks, to accumulate and place strategic items without disrupting the other products.

c. Space

Consider how you can maximize the space in the warehouse to the fullest, taking into account storage, stock, office, work area, storage of empty pallets, battery charging, and so on.

With different types of vertical shelves and stand-alone equipment, you should be able to design your warehouse according to your needs at first, in the meantime, you have to feel that such layouts are flexible enough to be in the fox in the future if needed.

And as a reference for you, here are 4 Tips on how to effectively plan a warehouse layout Design, such as:

1. Define your Goals

Determining your goal in planning a warehouse layout begins with the 3 principles outlined above and then continued with the more specific objectives needed for a particular business to be accomplished in the industry that fits your company's business field. Why so? Since each business will have different objectives for the layout and layout of their warehouse.

Some businesses may want to optimize them in accepting raw material supplies, while others require a more efficient process, and on other businesses, they may need to design their arsenal for cross-docking.

Nevertheless, regardless of your purpose, make sure that your warehouse layout design will be able to assist you in achieving that goal.

2. Determine your Inventory warehouse needs

After determining your goal, then you should immediately determine your inventory and storage needs. For that, you need to immediately plan for the number of your items that need to be saved, how big or small the item will be stored, where the item will arrive and where the item is going to depart, and so on.

What items you save will dictate anything you need to save it. This equipment or warehouse equipment, hallway space of your warehouse, high pallet shelf, and other equipment you need to handle these items.

3. Creating an implementation plan

Make as much detail as possible all the necessary steps to create your warehouse layout design. Group tasks by project, IE Pallet Rack building is one of the projects while buying Pallet Racking raw material is one of the steps in the project.

The next is to allocate appropriate resources to each task and project in your plan. Once you've finished creating your plan, check back everything, especially the time it takes to implement your plan.

4. Test your warehouse layout design

Just before you start to install something like a pallet rack or material shelf and equipment, you have to walk down your warehouse to make sure that it is ready for all to be installed.

Use Masking Tape to outline the main work area and bring something through it, and ask other employees to simulate the job at the same time.

This will give you information about the visual understanding of the space in your warehouse and whether it is optimized or not. Errors that occur at this time will result in worse mistakes at a later date.

What to do after warehouse Layout planning?

There are 2 things you should do after planning the warehouse layout, as follow:

Apply your plan
Investing in Inventory management systems
A well-designed warehouse will help you move freely and all warehouse operational activities can run efficiently. Well laid out warehouses can help you reduce wasted time, but will not help you in terms of inventory reduction.

Thus the article on 4 effective ways to plan a warehouse layout design. Hopefully useful and useful.

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