How should we design a warehouse?
This warehouse is massive, 1.5 million square feet and
they have tons of inventory for multiple brands in this location,
but what makes a warehouse great is three things.
The first of all is speed.
You're able to ship out as much product as possible.
The next one is redundancy.
You have multiple checks built-in to your distribution system to ensure that
the product that the customer asked for is actually the one that you delivered.
And finally, productivity.
Even though this is a massive warehouse, they're able to push
out as much product as possible out of this huge distribution center.
When it comes to designing out warehouse, we have to consider our goals,
speed, quality and productivity.
Now we accomplish them by implementing a warehouse that has number one,
the shortest distances possible and that is for all the products.
But more importantly, the items that are selling the best
must be located as close as possible to the shipping dock.
Second, we want to maintain our quality.
We don't want to ship out the wrong items, so
we have to have redundancy build in to the process.
And then finally, we have to maintain as much throughput in
our warehouse as possible by pushing out the items as quickly as possible.
We start with unloading the product off of our trucks, then we take the product.
Put it away into our storage location,
then it's going to sit in storage until the customer is asking for
the item and then we'll have a worker take it off the shelf.
Put it on a conveyor belt.
Moving to a sorting location where finally the whole order,
probably consisting of multiple product is going to be assembled into a package.
We're going to take all those packages, move them to the staging location in
front of the dock door where we then load our truck.
This whole process is controlled by a warehouse management system, which
is essentially a very big computer program that times all of these different steps.
This was the flow process, now let's visualize it in space.
See the conveyor belt right going through the middle of the building,
that then moves into the sorting area and the packaging area and they pull from
three different storage areas arranged by the importance of the items.
Most important items, shortest distances.
And then we assemble the order, close to the dock doors and move them out.