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MOVING FROM INSIDE OUT

Designing a new warehouse starts with an understanding of what goes on inside. Few businesses can assume today that a wrongly sized building can be corrected by growth or by renting or subletting temporary space. In the growing number of warehouse operations with very fast inventory turnover, serious deficiencies in material flow may be impossible or impractical to correct. Therefore, a critical first step is to determine just exactly what the operation will look like from inside out.

This starts with defining your business. Just what is the function of your warehouse anyway? For most companies, this is best answered by paraphrasing Clinton's political slogan: "It's the cycle time, stupid." In nearly every warehousing operation, a key goal is to reduce the time lapse between the moment when a customer wanted an item until that time when he or she received it. In the effort to reduce order cycle time, a growing number of warehouses are operating not just two shifts but sometimes three; not just five days, but sometimes seven. The best way to improve order cycle time is to have a warehouse that never sleeps; an operation where nothing must wait until tomorrow. Is your distribution center there to store dead merchandise or to move product more rapidly than ever before? As a growing number of operations turns from storehouses to cross-docks, warehouse buildings which were designed for the first function may fail to work efficiently at the second.