A warehouse project: ten questions before launch
How much stock, of what kind, how many orders and what growth: the answers shape the project.
A warehouse project should start with questions, not with a drawing. Many projects begin with the sentence "we need a building of 5,000 square metres", but that is not an answer, it is a guess. A warehouse found or fitted out on such a guess ends up, a year or two later, either cramped or half empty. Below are ten questions a manager should put to themselves and the team before the project starts.
Why start with questions
Warehouse capacity, equipment, headcount and the information system all follow from the input data. Without data, the project becomes guesswork, and the error shows only after the building is rented and the racking paid for, when changes are expensive. To answer the questions, six months of sales and receipts data is usually enough, that is, reports from 1C or Excel. What matters is that the answers are numbers, not assumptions.
No single person can answer these questions: sales knows the growth, finance knows the budget and the warehouse manager knows the processes. So it helps to hold one joint meeting of two or three hours and write the answers down together. Often the meeting itself exposes unexpected disagreements, for example that sales and the warehouse assess growth differently.
The ten questions
- How many product types (SKUs) are there, and how fast are new items added?
- What are the goods like: size, weight, packaging (pieces, boxes, pallets), fragility?
- Is a special regime needed: temperature, humidity, shelf life, hazardous or valuable goods?
- How many orders and order lines go out per day, and how many on the busiest day (season, pre-holiday days, promotions, big marketplace discount days)?
- How much stock sits in the warehouse at one time (pallet positions or cubic metres), and what share of it turns over slowly?
- How do goods arrive and leave: how many trips, what vehicles, at what hours do receiving and dispatch happen?
- What will the business look like in three to five years: sales volume, range, new channels (online, market, retail chains)?
- What information system is there: 1C, Excel or another; are barcodes, location codes and scanners needed?
- Staff: how many shifts, what skills, who drives the equipment, how easy is it to hire?
- What is the success criterion: picking speed, error rate, cost of one pallet position, order dispatch time?
If a question has no answer, for instance because product dimensions were never entered in the database, that is also an important result: a data-collection stage is needed before the project. In many cases it is enough to measure a few hundred of the fastest-moving items.
How answers turn into a project
Each question settles a concrete design decision. The size and packaging of goods indicate the type of racking and the size of the location. A special regime requires separate zones. The number of order lines sets the size of the picking area and the headcount. The volume of stock defines total capacity, and the number of trips fixes the number of receiving and dispatch doors. The growth plan shows how much margin to leave in the building and equipment.
An example, with illustrative figures. On the busiest day there are 2,400 order lines, on an average day 1,100. If a picker averages 40 lines an hour and a shift has 7 productive hours, one person picks 280 lines a day. Four people are enough for an average day, while nine are needed for the busiest. It makes sense to cover the difference not with permanent staff but with shift patterns, temporary workers and scheduling, otherwise people stand idle for most of the year.
The most common mistakes
The first mistake is to design only for the average day: the busiest day will stop the warehouse. The second is the opposite, building everything for the peak of the year and paying all year for empty space. The third is ignoring growth, the fourth is thinking about software at the very end, although location codes and barcodes should be planned together with the rack layout. The fifth is answering "roughly this much" and never checking the answer against reports.
Conclusion
The ten questions are the foundation of a warehouse project: they turn a guess into a number and a number into a concrete decision. The OmborExpert specialists help gather the answers, check them against reports and turn them into project requirements.