The Affect of Product Size on Warehouse Configuration

Warehouse Storage RacksThere are a number of ways that product size and weight affects your space requirements. Whether your storage is in boxes and plastic totes or gaylords and pallets, all determine your layout and space requirements. How you operate your facility – a pallet in/pallet out, pallet in/case out, or case in/case out facility – can affect how your warehouse is set-up top optimize your efficiency. All of these factors are critical in determining beam width and height and are used by Specialized Storage Solutions to design the right solution for your needs.

In order to prevent product damage there should be a minimum allowance of a four inch buffer area as well. For instance, if you hope to accommodate two 42” wide pallets on a level with no overhang, the best beam length is 96”.

Furthermore, if you want the ability to store any product in any location, you must design the system to store the highest pallet, including a minimum of 6” of “liftoff” for the lift truck to pick the pallet out of each slot. The height of each pallet is critical in determining the amount of pallets to be stored.

The total number of pallets you need to store, the number of pallets of each sku and what percentage of the pallets represent your most active items should be considered when determining the optimial layout. For instance, the 80/20 rule applies to nearly every business and should be employed to store your most active items closest to the shipping dock. This minimizes travel time, walking and search times and helps increase the productivity of your facility.

There are other factors to consider when you are looking at optimizing your facility layout. Questions such as: Do you store parts numerically, alphanumerically, by size, or in a random order? Do you store “families” of items together to facilitate efficient order picking? The answers to questions like these will become an overriding factor in your storage grid.

As you focus on the efficiency of your operation you need to take a look at questions such as: How many orders do you pick per day? How many people will be picking these orders? What is the typical number of items that are received and are shipped out on a daily basis? This will determine the area you’ll need for staging or checking in product.

Although this may seem like a lot of items to consider and be a bit overwhelming, expertise like this is what Specialized Storage Solutions brings to every project for every client. If you need help with determining your optimal layout, we can help ask the right questions, determine and design the right solution for your needs, and help you get on the path of better usage of your space and increasing your efficiency.

[intlink id=”783″ type=”page”]Read more about how Fiske Industries, a New York based beauty care/ cosmetics company, turned to Specialized Storage to help them properly expand their inventory.[/intlink]
2014-07-21T18:19:37+00:00