Planning a Distribution Center

Planning your warehouse and distribution center is like planning the cornerstone of your business model. These are critical links in the supply chain that will either make or break your ability to do business in the future. You have to take many steps to ensure that the capital that it takes to plan a distribution center will not go to waste. The old adage to measure twice, cut once is useful here. As six years down the line you will not want to go back and redesign your distribution center as business increases.

1. Define Goals and objectives

Your goals and objectives should be clearly defined and well understood by everyone involved in the project. For instance you may want your goal defined as minimizing the cost of running the warehouse while maximizing the productivity of the warehouse. It can also be more specific like trying to maximize flexibility so that with future expansion you will have the ability to change the distribution center without any nominal costs.

2. Keep Track of The Process

Look at the existing system. How can you improve it or even a better question how can you know how to improve it? The best way to do this is by interviewing the people who work at these areas. The employees that operate that part of the function probably no that part of the system than the original engineer that designed it. Any part of the system that needs to be redesigned should have an interview conducted that will help you understand the system from the workers perspective

3. Analyze

Analyzing is one of the most times consuming an important task of planning a distribution center. You need to look at how much space that you have to work with. How well does the product flow in and out of the facility? You need to understand what kind of conveying equipment needs to be used in the final design. If your analysis determines that the goals can be meeting than It is time to than I is time to move into the final step.

4. Create The Final Project Plan

This plan will identify all the steps that you need to take in order to create the warehouse from beginning to end. The project plan will contain all the major challenges that need to be overcome to erect the distribution center. You will also need to keep an account of the amount of resources that should be allocated for each task, and how much time should be allotted to accomplish any of these tasks.

Source: http://www.grossassociates.com/articles/design.htm , Gross Associates