Warehouse Design

THE LOGISTICS BUSINESS Consultants and Designers have very many years of practical experience of designing, implementing and running Warehouses, Distribution Centres and Supply Chains.  This gives us a detailed understanding of the relationship between the design of a system, its operation and the software requirements.  It is this multi-disciplinary knowledge that has enabled us to produce solutions that have met the objectives of the business cases throughout the operational lives of these systems.

Whether the technologies specified in the systems are primarily manual, mechanised or automated the underlying development process follows the same stages.  This reinforces the point that decisions on the level of mechanisation or automation within the different parts of a warehouse or distribution centre should not be finalised until the latter stages of the design process.

An overview of the process that applies to many projects is as follows:-

• understand the future business requirements that the facility needs to fulfil;

• analyse the existing operations and data;

• model the future operating scenarios;

• develop concept designs for the different parts of the system;

• develop the operational and software requirements for the system;

• specify the appropriate technology to meet the long term business and operational requirements;

• develop layout and integration drawings.

We use a wide range of processes and tools to undertake this work that include questionnaires, interactive modelling tools, 2D and 3D CAD systems.  Projects undertaken have included the design of Supply Chains, Warehouse and Distribution Centres, Materials Handling Systems and Automated Systems.  Projects of this type have been undertaken for companies such as Tesco, Pets at Home, Kellogg’s and Argos.

For further information see warehouse-design-designing-a-distribution-centre.pdf