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Blog
November 27, 2025
Why You Should be Intentional With Warehouse Design
When warehouse productivity stalls, the first reaction is often to seek more space or expensive automation. However, true efficiency often lies in intentional design and leveraging operational data to solve unseen problems. Design and strategy experts, like those at LIDD, focus on optimizing the existing physical layout and processes to achieve dramatic improvements in key metrics, such as picks per hour.
A common goal for many distributors is to hit a target like 100 picks per hour. Achieving this requires a deep dive into the operation’s bottlenecks, which often fall into three key areas:
3 Ways Intentional Design Drives Warehouse Productivity:
- Optimize Pick Path Length with Data (The 80/20 Rule): Many operations treat all items equally, assigning everything a full pallet position. By applying Pareto’s Law (the 80/20 rule), you identify that 20% of items generate 80% of your volume. Intentional design involves sizing slots to match item velocity, allowing you to fit up to 18 items in the space previously occupied by two, drastically reducing the distance a picker must walk.
- Separate Each-Picking from Case-Picking: When 30% of order lines require picking single units (eaches) out of cases, doing this in the main case-pick area causes congestion, increases errors, and leads to product damage. Segregating this volume into a dedicated, optimized area can smooth out the flow and boost accuracy.
- Correct Slotting and Sequencing: Picking stability is critical for building pallets that can withstand transportation with minimal product touches. Slotting products by product category alone, rather than by weight, size, and crushability, results in unstable pallets and excessive product handling. Intentional sequencing ensures the lightest, least crushable items are picked last to maintain stability during transit.
Key Takeaways
- Walking is Waste: In picking operations, approximately 50% of the time is spent walking. Reducing the pick path length by 40% (through slot size optimization) can yield a 20% gain in overall productivity.
- Don’t Treat All SKUs Equally: Use velocity and data analytics to ensure that items are slotted according to their movement. 70% of items in one case study were found to be in slots too large for their velocity.
- Think Network-Wide: Optimization isn’t limited to one facility. Modeling your network can reveal massive savings (e.g., 8-11% cheaper operational costs) by consolidating multiple smaller facilities into a single, optimized center.
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What exactly does your Distribution Center Design service cover?
Designing a warehouse isn’t just about drawing blueprints — it’s about making every square foot work harder.LIDD’s Distribution Center Design service includes facility sizing, layout optimization, automation strategy, and operational modeling. Our engineers draw insights from your historic data to simulate storage, process flows, and labor performance.This approach ensures that your facility supports future growth, not just today’s volume. Learn more about how our team blends engineering and operations expertise in our supply chain consulting practice.
We’re not hitting our throughput targets, can you help us understand why?
Through our supply chain audit services, we diagnose where productivity is lost — whether it’s layout constraints, slotting inefficiencies, or outdated workflows. Our consultants perform on-site operational audits, model alternative configurations, and identify quick wins that can unlock measurable gains in throughput and labor efficiency. Learn more about our projects in our case studies (link to insights)
How do your consultants help reduce unnecessary capital spending?
Before investing in new automation or real estate, we make sure you actually need it.Our engineers conduct feasibility studies, capacity models, and sensitivity analyses to test every major investment. By aligning design and financial justification early, we’ve helped clients avoid multimillion-dollar expansions by optimizing what they already have. This method — combining engineering precision with supply chain technology consulting — ensures that every dollar invested delivers measurable returns.
How do you approach network design for multi-site or multi-country operations?
Network design starts long before the building phase.We evaluate demand patterns, service levels, and transportation costs across regions to define the optimal number and placement of facilities. Using advanced modeling tools, we simulate how shifting a single DC can affect total landed cost and delivery times. Our experts combine on-the-ground logistics experience with digital modeling to guide expansion decisions. For complex multi-country operations, we also leverage our logistics automation expertise to ensure consistency across sites.
Can you help us validate a third-party design or quote before we commit?
Absolutely. Many clients come to us after receiving proposals from automation vendors or contractors and want a second opinion. As a vendor-agnostic partner, we review technical drawings, assumptions, and cost models to confirm whether the design meets your performance goals – without any bias. Our objective analysis can reveal oversizing, missing constraints, or inflated ROI claims — helping you negotiate confidently. If needed, we provide independent design validation and benchmarking based on our experience in distribution center design projects worldwide.
We’ve already invested in automation, can your team still support us?
Yes. We frequently work with organizations that have existing automated systems but need help fine-tuning or expanding them. Our specialists integrate new processes or technologies with what’s already in place, ensuring compatibility and optimal flow. Whether you’re adding a new conveyor zone or ASRS, we make sure automation works for you and your objectives —. See similar transformation results in our success stories.