Designing a Warehouse Layout: Best Practices

The layout of your warehouse is determined by the type of your business. For example, stocking tiny, fragile jewellery items with several SKUs necessitates a different retail shelving display than stocking furniture pieces.

However, there are warehouse fitting best practises to bear in mind throughout the business (even though your layout will need to change over time as you grow).

1. Sketch out the warehouse operations.

When planning a warehouse layout, sketch out the internal warehouse operations and how they will interact with one another. You’ll also need to arrange around the dock doors where the carriers will drop off and pick up.

Plan out the optimum work areas for receiving inventory, storing products on warehouse fitting or retail shelving display, choosing and packaging items, and preparing orders for shipping. This will enhance efficiency, keep the warehouse orderly, and allow productivity. Don’t forget to think about measures to reduce any safety concerns as well as your team’s general well-being.

2. Establish warehouse workstations

What are the basic workstations you require?

Is there enough room in your warehouse plan for all of your staff to work comfortably?

Creating one-way workflow is often the most effective approach to set up warehouse work stations. A simple one-way flow aids in warehouse safety and reduces congestion.

Once you’ve decided how to arrange separate work stations, you may mark out pathways with signs or floor tape to offer clear guidance for your employees.

3. Prepare for storage

Choosing the correct inventory storage system to improve the picking, packing, and shipping process to guarantee order accuracy, efficiency, and speed is one of the finest warehouse practises.

Reorganizing routes or zones, or even a full warehouse, might seem to be a difficult and time-consuming task. You’ll need to figure out how to effectively store merchandise to save carrying expenses (like do you need a retail shelving display), transport big volumes of stuff to various places, and make sure everything is done properly so there are no problems throughout the selecting process.

Learn how warehouse fitting works to improve storage and warehouse procedures and structure your warehouse around usefulness and efficiency.

4. Put in place a warehouse management system.

Using a warehouse management system (WMS) may result in decreased mistake rates, better overall warehouse performance, and faster inventory replenishment. Though a warehouse management system will not directly influence warehouse layout design, it will influence how you arrange equipment and work stations.

Warehouse automation is an essential component of supply chain optimization because it lowers the time, effort, and mistakes caused by human, variable processes.

5. Customize the choosing and packaging area

Planning up a picking procedure ahead of time can assist you in getting your warehouse up and operating. However, it is crucial to remember that an efficient warehouse will need to enhance the picking and packing process on a regular basis to promote high order accuracy — particularly as your firm expands.

One of the most efficient approaches to improve the supply chain is to optimise warehouse picking operations and/or use order picking software. Depending on the size of the warehouse, the quantity and kinds of items it contains, and the overall number of employees, one selecting approach may be more suited to you than others.

Here are a few examples of standard warehouse picking strategies:

Picking in batches

Working on the same orders in bulk or batches all at once in a succession, rather than one at a time or by various personnel in between other orders, is what batch selecting entails. This selection approach is appropriate for satisfying a large number of similar orders with the same SKUs.

Zone selection

Zone picking entails allocating pickers to certain areas of the warehouse and allowing them to only select one order at a time inside that region. If an order requires items from more than one zone, it is often sent along through a conveyor belt.

Choosing a Wave

Wave picking is a hybrid of batch and zone picking in which a picker stays inside a zone but picks many orders at once. This method is most effective in warehouses with a high number of SKUs.

Picking discretely

When a picker works on one order at a time as it is placed, this is known as discrete picking. All SKUs in the order are retrieved by the same picker, who may handle orders throughout the plant. This strategy is best suited for small firms with a modest number of SKUs and/or tiny warehouses or storage facilities.

Whatever choosing approach you use, the aim is to increase team efficiency while maintaining a high order accuracy rate as your company expands.

6. Gather employee feedback

It is critical to communicate with your staff, get their opinion, and adopt any improvements that may benefit their day-to-day activities. Request that your personnel study the warehouse layout plan and provide any comments for improvements.

Because they are continually travelling over the whole facility, your picking staff will grasp your present warehouse layout better than anybody else. Work with them to discover opportunities to improve fulfillment processes that remove hassles, confusion, and human error throughout the process.