Warehousing 101 – Meet the Designers at Everything Warehouse

Making some changes in your warehouse or opening a warehouse for the first time? The design of your warehouse will determine your success. Traffic flow patterns, inventory management software and innovative storage solutions are worth nothing if they don’t work for your business. These are solutions to general challenges, but when it comes to customizing, nothing beats an experienced warehouse design team.
Everything Warehouse offers you this consulting service so that you get the most for your money. You’re investing time, talent and treasure into your business, and you deserve to have the best warehouse layout using the products that are right for you. Why hire a warehouse design consultant?

Here are a few good reasons;

•They are objective. Warehouse design consultants only want you to succeed. They want the products that you purchase for your warehousing needs to work the hardest for you. A good design consultant will personally visit your site and evaluate what is necessary to create an ergonomic design. He or she will ask about challenges and goals and provide a design that works with your business plan. The design consultant will be knowledgeable not only about the warehousing industry, but also the industry in which you’re doing business. For example, if food distributors use certain pallet systems that will easily comply with the manufacturer’s product shipping, the consultant will know which are the best and how the system needs to comply.

•They can make the best use of space. Experienced designers know how to get the most out of a space – large or small. If you need space, they look in all directions, and they think out of the warehousing box, if you will. They recommend second floors built with lifts and decking that can serve as storage or office space. They recommend pallet systems that stack and use the space upward as well as outward. In a larger warehouse, they’ll help you navigate the terrain and design a traffic flow that doesn’t require your workers to walk five miles a day.

•They can recommend the best equipment for warehouse efficiency. Because they will be designing the space to fit your needs and budget, that extra-wide forklift might not be necessary. Or, if you want to be more efficient with your people power, perhaps they will recommend an ergonomic carton shelving system that can make taking inventory and simply picking product so much easier and quicker.

•They know safety “rules” — literally. The designers know how important safety is in a warehouse situation, and they know the rules of warehouse design. They will not submit a design that incorporates shelving that can’t hold the weight of your product or build a system with aisles too narrow for the forklift to navigate. They are there to help you succeed by incorporating the right product into the right design.

•They are product experts. They work with cantilever shelves of every type, weight and shape. They know the advantages of wire decking and they know what products are best suited or humid or cold environments. Because they have worked with so many individual products, it is much easier for them to combine the right products into a system. Designers can dream up innovative solutions just for you because they’ve worked with everything already. Best of all, they can recommend the best products out of the thousands of choices you have in the warehouse industry. That, in itself, is inviting.

•They let you do your job. Hiring a warehouse design consultant is like hiring an assistant for a month. They’ll do their jobs – analyzing and designing your warehouse space – which lets you get back to your job – managing the people and systems that make your warehouse function. You don’t have to spend futile hours poring over the thousands of products that don’t even fit into your floor plan. Consultants are time-efficient, affordable and one of the best investments you can make in your warehouse.