Facility & Warehouse Layout Design Consulting (Lean Approach)

Warehouse layout design and Plant layout design follow four specific steps whether you are building a new facility, redesigning an existing factory, or improving a warehouse distribution center. The goal of these efforts is minimizing labor movement and therefore cost.

There are two approaches to redesigning warehouses and plants to achieve labor savings. One is the use of automation. These projects can provide tremendous savings, however, there are significant issues you must be aware of before making this investment.

First, automation usually requires multi-million dollar investments in hardware and software. Second, anytime equipment and software are involved, there are risks that they won’t work together when turned on. Finally, this solution can be very inflexible. If your products, order-patterns or volume change, you can be stuck with a system that doesn’t match your business.

7 Benefits of Optimized Facility Layout

Reduce Labor Costs: By streamlining your workflow, we help minimize unnecessary movement and handling within your facility. Most warehouse expenses are labor-related, and improving layout efficiency can significantly cut costs. Our consulting team focuses on designing a solution that enhances productivity while maintaining safe, ergonomic practices.

Increase Storage Capacity: Through expert layout and design, we optimize your warehouse space utilization, allowing you to store more inventory without expanding your footprint. Efficient material handling ensures every inch of the warehouse supports your business goals.

Improve Workflow Efficiency: A Lean-based approach to design services allows us to analyze traffic patterns, product flow, and order processes to create a layout that simplifies operations. A more efficient workflow boosts order accuracy and shortens fulfillment times.

Enhance Storage and Materials Management: Our team creates organizational systems that improve visibility, reduce waste, and support continuous improvement. Good warehouse management means faster decisions, fewer errors, and smoother logistics execution.

Increase Productivity: By aligning your facility layout with your operational goals, we help your workforce accomplish more in less time. Streamlined processes lead directly to higher productivity and better order turnaround performance.

Provide Detailed CAD Drawings: We utilize CAD technology to present multiple warehouse configuration options before implementation. Visualizing alternatives helps ensure your final design will function as intended and meet operational demands.

Simplify Implementation and Future Growth: Our designs are flexible, allowing you to adapt quickly to shifts in volume, product mix, or industry needs. This approach ensures a scalable warehouse that supports long-term efficiency and success.

Our Process

Supply Velocity’s approach to facility layout planning draws on rich Lean expertise and practical industry experience, helping clients achieve measurable results without large capital investments. Instead, we approach labor movement as non-value added, and use the Lean methodology to reduce unnecessary move time.

This requires four basic steps: 1) understand the current state, 2) identify and eliminate the non-value-added work in the current state, 3) design the future state, and 4) plan the transition to the new facility layout.

Understand the Current State

When designing a new warehouse or plant, or redesigning an existing one, it is important to evaluate the current process. This requires the use Lean Six Sigma tools including Spaghetti Mapping, Time Studies, Pareto Analysis, and Process Flow Mapping. We do additional analytics on order profiles to understand what items are sold together.

Spaghetti maps visualize the movement of labor in the facility, and help people see the excessive movement in the current process. Time studies accompany spaghetti maps and provide detailed data on the duration of each step to process an order.

Pareto analysis shows the velocity of inventory items and is used to make sure fast moving items are located close to where they are used. Process Flow Mapping provides a visual of an order’s information flow and ensures that the layout is aligned to the information flow.

Identify & Eliminate Non-Value Added Steps

Process flow maps, spaghetti maps and time studies are carefully analyzed to identify non-value-added work that can be eliminated. After identification, the team brainstorms how to eliminate non-value-added work, and prioritizes these action items based on benefit and difficulty. The improvements can involve layout, workstation design or process changes.

Create New Facility Design

The layout team, working closely with an experienced engineer, uses the prior steps to make specific decisions on layout (example: where fork-trucks should be parked), or determine general layout principles (example: inventory items should have only one pick location in the facility).

These decisions and principles are turned into a layout plan by making paper cut-outs of racking, machinery, fork-trucks, other storage media and equipment, and placing them on a drawing of the empty facility. Using paper cut-outs allows for an interactive experience and experimentation.

The final version is put into CAD (computer-drawing) to ensure the layout will work. At this stage, the team will locate SKUs based on velocity to make sure high volume items are convenient to put-away and pick.

After layout is complete the team will begin implementing 5S Visual Management to instill operational discipline and make the transition to the new layout easier to implement.

Transition Planning

With all workstations, inventory items, and racking locations designated, the team must plan the transition. This involves a detailed step-by-step plan for what moves when, considering dependencies and the need to track locations of everything during the move. We often use a Gantt chart to keep track of these dependencies.

More on Warehouse & Plant Operations

• Warehouse & Plant Operations Assessment
• Facility & Warehouse Layout Design Consulting (Lean Approach)
• Lean Warehousing Optimization (Expert Consulting Services)
• Ecommerce Fulfillment

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