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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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