Is improper warehouse design the reason for lack of productivity?« Back to Questions List

Inefficient warehouse design is definitely going to impact your productivity. Good design helps you control inventory better and also increases space utilization.Logisticians design warehouse to ensure that the movement inside the warehouse can be minimized and reduce the effort required for each activity. We can inarguably say that bad warehouse design is a major reason of productivity loss

Warehouse design is basically lay-out design of a warehouse space. Warehouse design or lay-out design is broadly based on process flow or SOP and estimated stock quantity planned during selection of suitable warehouse space. Experts design the Lay-out of warehouse to optimise available space. Based on stock quantity, process flow and target TAT, a solution engineer designs the warehouse lay-out, considers manpower numbers and identify the resources (MHE, IT, storage equipment, etc.) required. Warehouse design does impact on the productivity and overall impact on warehouse performance.

A good warehouse design helps its operator in following ways:

– Easy and fast put-away and picking of items
– Reduction in handling cost

– Proper and enough space for each item and activity
– Reserve(Buffer) space for additional inventory
– Hurdle free operations
– Improved customer service and
– Safety

Undoubtedly, warehouse design has a huge impact on productivity. Every warehouse should be designed to maximise operational flow of the men and material which means that the warehouse designers need to carefully study the product profiles, their sales/movement frequency, seasonality etc and align it with company’s sales strategy to come-up with the optimal design for the warehouse. Use of manpower and MHEs form a substantial part of warehousing costs and hence improvement in productivity of both lead to sugnificant cost saving and directly impact the bottom line of the business. Even more so in B2C operations which are highly manpower intensive. It is widely believed that right warehouse design can save you upto 15% of the costs of manpower/MHEs.